Recently the team that accompanies the Ultimate the Guitar community established a new company called Muse Group and with which made it known that they have absorbed the sound editor Audacity, which will now be developed alongside other products from the new company.
For those who are still unfamiliar with Audacity, you should know that this is a popular application that provides tools for editing sound files, recording and digitizing sound, changing sound file parameters, layering tracks, and applying effects (for example, noise suppression, change of tempo and pitch). The Audacity code is distributed under the GPL license.
It is mentioned that development will continue as a free project. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Muse Group projects will also include the free music editor MuseScore, purchased by the same team in 2017 and which will continue to be actively developed as a free project.
Plans for Audacity include the intention of hiring developers and designers to modernize the interface, improve usability and implement a non-destructive editing mode.
The project has been around for more than 20 years and is still popular, despite the archaic interface and not the simplest sound processing process.
Audacity will remain 100% forever without feature levels or limitations.
As with MuseScore, users can expect optional cloud services (file storage, sharing, etc.), but such capabilities are optional and the software is fully featured and fully functional without this.
Although Muse Group as a concept is quite new, it is the same philosophy, the same model and the same equipment as Ultimate Guitar. What you should expect from Muse Group going forward is pretty much what you've seen with MuseScore since the acquisition.
As we continue to make acquisitions, we will likely not change our existing business models much. We will try to do as much as possible as free as possible (respecting rights holders), and we will invest heavily in product development, rapidly expanding product teams with the best and brightest we can find.
The purpose of Muse Group is to consolidate previously acquired assets for the Ultimate Guitar project yet Exactly how the Audacity acquisition took place has not been disclosedBut the Muse Group is believed to have acquired the trademark rights from Dominic Mazzoni, the original creator of Audacity, and also purchased the ownership rights to the code from some key developers.
Martin Keary, formerly responsible for the development and design of the MuseScore interface, received the status of "product owner" from MuseScore and Audacity, that is, a person who represents the interests of users and other stakeholders.
Daniel Ray has been appointed in charge of product strategy for Muse Group and has assured users that Audacity will remain 100% open, without cutting the functionality and dividing it into paid / free versions.
At the same time, by analogy with MuseScore, Audacity may have optional support for integration with cloud services (for storage and collaboration), but the product will still be fully functional without them. Muse Group has the same team behind Ultimate Guitar, and both companies share a common philosophy and operating model.
The fact that promises are not empty words is confirmed by the four-year history of MuseScore's development after the acquisition of the project.
After the MuseScore project passed into the hands of a new owner, a paid development team was formed, regular updates were released, the functionality was gradually increased, the user interface was optimized, a new note font was used, some subsystems internals were completely rewritten in implementing new features like sequencer mode in the future, work is underway to switch from GPLv2 to GPLv3.
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