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 couldn’t record, it couldn’t 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 that’s still recognizable today. PCs have turned notably less boxy and beige, and are much faster as well. They’re 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 Audacity’s 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 you’re curious to learn more about Audacity’s history, our product owner Martin Keary released a video about it when he took over, and our designer Leo Wattenberg ran Audacity’s source code through a visualizer to show the evolution of files within Audacity.

What’s next for Audacity

We’re 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, we’re still working hard on Audacity 4.0, which won’t be quite yet a DAW – 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.

Let’s 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 Audacity’s progress to becoming not just the free option for audio editing - but the best option.

We’ll add more designs over the coming months - follow us on YouTube or join our Discord to get notified when new merch drops!

Audacity 3.7 has been released!

It features everyone’s favorite “bug fixes and performance improvements”. See the full changelog for details.

Other than that ­– there’s nothing exciting to see here. Which in itself is exciting! The reason for this very thin release is that we’ve focused most of our attention towards Audacity 4.0 instead! Audacity 4 will feature a complete remake of the UI and is still quite some ways out. We’ll update you on scope and progress on that over the coming months.

In the meantime: Check out the MuseHub for some cool plugins.

Watch the release video

Major changes in Audacity 3.6

Master effects

Audacity now features master effects. Master effects are effects which apply to the entire project at once. More information can be found at Audacity Support: Using master effects & realtime effects.

New compressor and limiter

A new compressor and limiter has been added, replacing the previous versions. A gain reduction history has been added to these effects when they’re used as a realtime effect.

Factory Presets suitable for a wide range of use cases for these effects have been provided by Vladislav Isaev and Marek Iwaszkiewicz, available via the Presets & Settings button.

New themes

Audacity now features new and improved dark and light themes. You can switch between themes via Preferences -> Interface. The theme previously used still is around as the Classic theme, and themes even older than that can be optionally installed as custom themes.

Updated instructions on creating custom themes can be found here.

Increased performance

Audacity is now quite a bit snappier than before, especially when working on larger projects and on larger screens.

See the full changelog

We are excited to announce Audacity 3.5, which adds the following features:

Cloud project saving

We’ve introduced a new cloud-saving feature that allows you to save your Audacity projects to audio.com. This allows you to work from any device, share & collaborate with others and restore previous versions if something went wrong.

Automatic tempo detection

Audacity can now automatically detect the tempo of imported loops, and adjust them to be in tempo. Tempo detection is done via both audio analysis and metadata checking. If you want to prepare your loop for automatic tempo detection without relying on audio analysis, both acidizer tempo tags or simply writing “123 bpm” anywhere into the filename work. Automatic tempo detection can be disabled via Preferences -> Import/Export.

Pitch shifting

You now can non-destructively change the pitch of a clip by holding Alt and pressing the Up and Down arrow keys. Alternatively, you can click on the overflow menu (…) and select “Pitch and speed…”. When changing the pitch this way, an arrow in the UI indicates how much you’ve shifted it.

and more!

There have been many other changes for this release.

• Added the ability to export labels as subtitle files.
• Added an option to skip plugin scanning.
• Added an overflow menu, and speed and pitch indicators for clips.
• Various changes to a variety of features.
• Removed some niche features to simplify the app. This should make Audacity a bit less overwhelming to use, and also will speed up future development as fewer things need to be considered.

A more detailed overview of these changes can be found in our changelog. You can download Audacity on audacityteam.org/download.

The Intel OpenVINO plugin also has been updated for version 3.5.