The open source audio software Audacity was sold two months ago to Muse Group, a company that also runs the guitar chord website Ultimate Guitar.
Audacity now collects data
Anyone who enjoys playing guitar will have noticed that this has a huge collection of songs and arrangements, but it has also made business practices more and more user-unfriendly over time. For example, you can no longer print, you can’t access the site at all on your smartphone, and you need a subscription to access it, which you quickly slip into by accident.
Now Muse Group will also be running Audacity and the first step taken is to pull data from your computer as fosspost writes. As you can see nicely here in the scrennshot not only technical data is sent home to the company but also “data for law enforcement, ligitation and authorities requests”. This data is also, see the following screenshot, shared with pretty much everyone.
So instead of a clean open source software you now have an open source software on your computer, which in the worst case sends personal data to anyone – linked to your IP address. This step is not really thought through, especially in the open source community, that of course resistance arose immediately. We assume that a fork, i.e. an additional development branch will be formed, which will continue to develop Audacity in its clean form. After all, the same thing often happens, for example, about ten years ago with OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
We believe there will soon be another clean Audacity
Since the shitstorm in the community is so big, a few hours ago they directly backtracked a bit with the following statement:
But honestly: if I use an offline program it should stay offline. Who knows if not still the actual data audio data go somewhere. Our tip: uninstall it and don’t use it anymore. Probably there will soon be a good fork that respects you better as a user.
Alternatives to Audacity
Until then, you can try the following alternatives:
