Audacity turns 25 years old!
By Leo Wattenberg
Wednesday, May 28, 2025 On this day, 25 years ago, the very first public version of Audacity was released, Audacity 0.8.
Audacity 0.8 was very different to what we have today: It couldnβt record, it couldnβt use plugins, and it could only export as WAV, AIFF, SF and AU.

Since then, a lot has happened. Audacity 1.0 was released two years later, sporting a logo and layout thatβs still recognizable today. PCs have turned notably less boxy and beige, and are much faster as well. Theyβre so fast in fact, that many features which would have been unthinkable 25 years ago are now very much possible - and even expected. We have worked tirelessly to improve Audacityβs audio editing capabilities, adding features like realtime effects, non-destructive edits and time stretching, a master channel and even some AI-powered effects which are actually useful.
If youβre curious to learn more about Audacityβs history, our product owner Martin Keary released a video about it when he took over, and our designer Leo Wattenberg ran Audacityβs source code through a visualizer to show the evolution of files within Audacity.
Whatβs next for Audacity
Weβre planning to release another minor patch (Audacity 3.7.4) in the next couple weeks, which among various bug fixes finally brings aforementioned AI effects to macOS.
In addition to that, weβre still working hard on Audacity 4.0, which wonβt be quite yet a DAW β but will tackle a lot of UX snags, which made Audacity so far more annoying to use than necessary. We will soon post an update on what to expect exactly for Audacity 4.0.
Letβs celebrate with Audacity merch!
After 25 years of making it rather difficult to send any money our way, we finally have opened up a merch store at merch.audacityteam.org. Every purchase made will help support our full-size development team, and accelerate Audacityβs progress to becoming not just the free option for audio editing - but the best option.
Weβll add more designs over the coming months - follow us on YouTube or join our Discord to get notified when new merch drops!