How We Designed Audacity 4

Tantacrul
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2025–2026
YouTube
1.9M views · 1 year ago · documentary · intermediate · evergreen

Tantacrul's hour-long video on how the Audacity 4 redesign was made, from the Muse Group's head of software. It covers a plan to remove technical debt and overhaul the UI, including getting rid of modes and the Audacity says no problem.

HN people recommend it as an informative and fun look at what it takes to overhaul the UX of a large open source tool.

“the Audacity UX designer made a massive video about the next UX redesign”
UX process & practiceUI design craft
#audacity#uxredesign#opensourceux#tantacrul#modes#techdebt

10 comments from Hacker News

k
@kuekacang2026 · in “Audacity 4.0”
Should watch the pre release video ▶ this video If what they're saying is true, this project is very much a pile of tech debt. They need to migrate whatever they can early before continuing work on the audio engine.
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L
@Lautzi2026 · in “Audacity 4.0”
I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch! [1] ▶ this video
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f
@fainpul2026 · in “FreeCAD”
Well said. It seems to me, many FOSS projects suffer from long time contributors which are extremely conservative and don't like any kind of change. Hence every new or improved feature becomes merely a setting (which barely anybody will discover) which is not enabled by default. The UX does only worsen this way because old cruft coexists with its replacement, settings grow fast, the combinatorial explosion of all feature combinations produces tons of bugs and new users will always be turned off by the first use experience. To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed, which is somewhat incompatible with unpaid open source development. I think this video about Audacity's redesign is informative in this regard: ▶ this video
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0
@0xFF01232025 · in “Blender 5.0”
Possibly Audacity, given the direction v4 is taking. Great video essay / update here: ▶ this video
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b
@brudgers2025 · in “How we are building Audacity 4”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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n
@ndiddy2026 · in “Audacity 4.0”
They went over why switching to Qt was the best option for their team here: ▶ this video .
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i
@iknowstuff2026 · in “Our commitment to Windows quality”
Here’s a great example of UX that needed changing despite breaking muscle memory: ▶ this video
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M
@Mashimo2025 · in “Tenacity – a multi-track audio editor/recorder”
Audacity had a 5 year plan on removing technical debt and overhauling the UI ▶ this video (1 hour long video) Will this be merged into Tenacity or are they going further apart?
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p
@p4bl02025 · in “VST3 audio plugin format is now MIT”
There is a lot of good news in open source audio these days. Also see this video presenting the work done and planned for the future version 4 of Audacity: ▶ this video
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f
@fschuett2025 · in “Free software scares normal people”
> Free audio editing software that requires hours of learning to be useful for simple tasks. To be fair, the Audacity UX designer made a massive video about the next UX redesign and how he tried to get rid of "modes" and the "Audacity says no" problem: ▶ this video So this problem should get better in the future. Good UX (doesn't necessarily have to have a flashy UI, but just a good UX) in free software is often lacking or an afterthought.
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