This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
[Edit: indeed, its actually good that it's 2gb]
2gb plugin??!
Btw, does it work with tenacity?
AI models are often multiple gigabytes, tbh it's a good sign that it's not "AI" marketing bullshit (less of a risk with open source projects anyway). I'm pretty wary of "AI" audio software that's only a few megabytes.
Tensorflowlite models are tiny, but they're potentially as much an audio revolution as synthetizer were in the 70s. It's hard to tell if that's what we're looking at here.
It seems reasonable given it includes multiple AI models.
2gb is pretty normal for an AI model. I have some small LLM models on my PC and they're about 7-10gb big. The big ones take up even more space.
I thought audacity was tarnished with spyware or something these days. Is it safe again?
after looking into it:
it's not and it never was.
a) it's open source, so nobody's putting that shit in there without getting caught
b) it had an opt-in error reporting feature that would send data back... that was the entire thing...
What? You must be joking. Really? The entire thing was about opt-in error reporting?
.... seriously, that can't be it, can it?
Not really that simple, it was an apparent change to the privacy policy that vaguely anticipated collection of arbitrary user data, which shook the confidence of the open source community on the project. The fact this happened right after audacity was sold was the cherry on top.
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213
Changes were eventually reverted or revised.
yep... really just that...
i've used it forever with a very restrictive firewall and i've never seen it do anything unexpected... or any phoning home at all...
It was a pull request to add opt-out analytics that got blown out of proportion, where the real issue was the EULA and how tonedeaf of a move it was considering the community around Audacity. IIRC, they ended up replacing it with opt-in analytics.
Not really, but there is a fork called tenacity which fixes this
I've been using the OpenVINO plugins for a few weeks and it's genuinely impressive. Noise cancelling is one thing, but the transcription tool is amazing. I can create subtitles from conference recordings in minutes and create transcripts of recorded zoom calls, etc. and it does it for multiple languages.
That's the kind of shit I like using AI for.
The music separation and speech transcription plug-ins actually sound nice. Obviously that will depend on how reliable they actually are.
I just tried the OpenVINO transcription on a random speech-over-music mp3 I happened to have: it works great, FAR better quality than I expected (I think I was expecting Youtube quality, but this is much cleaner and clearer). Perfect capitalization, good sentence breaks, adequate punctuation (commas, periods, question marks).
Only problem is that I can't figure out how to copy the transcription so I can paste it outside Audacity: the transcriptions show up attached to specific portions of sound, like track labels. While it will save me the trouble of having to actually transcribe audio manually, to get them out of Audacity and into a word processor it looks like I may still be stuck copying each "label" individually unless I can find a way to copy or export them.
EDITED TO ADD: I just answered my own question, lol. File -> Export Other -> Export Labels -> .txt file
I read "Audacity ads" and thought for a moment they had gone to the dark side
We already had a scare with them, but turns out it was very unfair overreaction to the project.
In this case I'm happy as long as it's hardware platform independent and uses open source released models.
AI music art has been for a long time in the hands of industry moguls and us peasants have had nothing. So I'm happy with anything that puts this power in the hands of the everyman.
Was it unfair? I haven't been following since they got bought out by spyware?
EDIT: Audacity was acquired by a company called MuseGroup in 2021 who added unnecessary telemetry and they admit that they do provide the data the collect to third parties. Some claim the changes were reverted but I haven't confirmed that myself so until I see there is no telemetry it's spyware as far as I'm concerned.
Use Tenacity instead
What's the difference?
In April 2021, Muse Group acquired the famous audio editing applicaiton Audacity. Their goals for Audacity were to bring much needed improvements to Audacity. However, not too long after, there was an attempt to add telemetry to the program
Ok so what's Tenacity? A fork pre shittification?
Aye, but a little more convoluted. TL;DR: Several new projects forked to avoid the enshitification, and with much time and drama, most of the actually active maintainers joined forces under the Tenacity name+repo. (And 4chan was part of the drama, because of course they were.)
Windows only :(
According to the repo, it builds fine on Linux. They just don't distribute a binary for it.
https://github.com/intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity/issues/27
I'm sure I used to use Audacity back in the day as a free, quick and dirty editor to splice up audio tracks. I'm talking at least 10 years ago.
Had no idea it was still even a thing.
It's honestly pretty much the industry standard for indie creators. There's nothing super flashy about it, it just does its job very well.
This along with 7-zip and OBS and the like have been pretty impressive success stories for FOSS, even if most of their users don't even know what that means.
...and Audacity for Windows 64-bit is required to run these plugins.
Useless.
On lemme I'm often reminded of the vegan joke:
How do you tell if someone is a Linux user? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
Oh boy this is what I always wanted woooo
