What the actual fuck is this?

Corporate Hunger games?

Yup. Government has businesses by the balls.

But corruption exists.

Therefore the goverment only ever really pulls small businesses and normal people by the balls, while the big businesses and uber rich (money heavyweights) get to pull the government by the tongue. Sometimes even the balls as well.

Just as Supply Side Jesus intended.

the total wackjob who thinks you need a midnight or 5 am meeting to watch a 10 minute video recording

I’m usually all for rehabilitation, but this behaviour deserves Gitmo-level torture.

I can remember my own coversations myself, thanks.

And what I feel I might both need and forget I’ll write down Either on the phone or using pen and paper.

Just like the laws, that’s just the first step. Today it’s opt in and soon enough it’ll have no opt-out.

It’s as Tantacrul (the new head designer of the app) would put it

A lot of little things that all add up

The app was taken over by the Musescore team, owned (as in, paid a salary by) a Russian private enterprise called UltimateGuitar.

They’ve already made a lot of really, really bad decisions in regards to Musescore itself.

If you don’t know, Musescore is an app not too dissimilar to Audacity that UltimateGuitar took over some years before they did Audacity. And they did a bunch of moves the FOSS community dislikes.

They’re bound to do the same to Audacity. They just had a lot less time to do it and a lot more pushback from the much larger (and as such more healthy) Audacity community.

As for Audacity, they’ve added a bunch of features. They also fixed core faults with the app: included nondestructive editing and fixed some UX issues.

Which is great.

However, these positive things are just the tip of the “changes” iceberg. And the bottom gets dark, fast.

To start off at the tip with the most pet-peevy thing ever, the new team tends to make bloat. In Musescore’s case, Musescore 2 and 3 ran much faster than Musescore 4. It isn’t even comparable, and Audacity is bound to follow the same path.

Then the new Audacity UI looks great, but it introduces its own issues. Such as turning the app’s UI into a generic modern one, which some people dislike. With Musescore the changes were relatively contained, but Audacity’s UI, UX and workflow was changed as fundamentally as it could have. Old Audacity and New Audacity are pretty much different tools to learn because of it (Old was a simle editor as they were way back when, and New is a DAW - a fundamentally different workflow with a vastly different UX philosophy).

Aa such, the switch to New Audacity is easier for users from any other DAW (such as Protools, Logic, Ableton) than for Old Audacity users. Because Old Audacity was never a traditional DAW.

Then there’s the deeper layers: all the changes a for-profit overtake means for a FOSS project.

Still tame, but slightly underwater: Musescore was changed from a fully offline app to one tightly integrated into an online ecosystem. Musescore (the UltimateGuitar brand) really wants you not to save your files to your computer, but to their online score sharing platform musescore.com.

They also added telemetry and tracking to Musescore.

They also did a logo redesign for Musescore. At first it was the old logo, objectively fixed.

But after not even five years of new management, the old Musescore logo was fully scrapped “to be moved in line with other UltimateGuitar products” (to paraphrase the lead designer). In other words, it was stripped of its personality.

All of the same is bound to happen to Audacity.

In fact, the logo thing already has. Audacity’s logo was also “brought in line.”

And this new Audacity logo is especially abhorrent. Tantacrul (aforementioned head designer) adressed it in a video, but the explanation is very shallow to the point of being downright insulting. The community hates it since it quite literally removed all elements of the original.

The only resemblance of an element retained is the general “headphone” concept. But that’s a very long strech. The new headphone looks more like a sperm than a headphone. If no one told you it was supposed to be one and not the other, you probably wouldn’t even know.

Not even the colors were spared. The old logo featured navy blue headphones worn by a waveform with an orange core and yellow outer parts, resembling a flame. It’s a genius concept for a logo (although the execution for the official renders of the logo was always admittedly very shabby).

The New Audacity logo is, again, a pinkish-purplish sperm. It’s supposed to be a pair of headphones, but it’s really not. It got rid of the genius concept combining three distinct elements: headphones (listening), a waveform (seeing) and flame (feeling). The new one posesses none. It’s pure corporate soullessness. And an insult to anyone having any feeling for Audacity.

Afterwards they did revise their new logo by adding back the waveform as well. The improvement is marginal, and an insult is still an insult. And this one especially is as painful as they get.

With Audacity being a very popular and a communaly dear FOSS project, there have been a lot of community renders on the original Audacity logo. No one would have faulted UltimateGuitar for taking one directly or using multiple as inspiration to make their own minimalist version in line with their current brand identity and style (if only their style wasn’t to kill the original that is).

It’s not an impossible ask to achieve. Retaining essence and soul while giving the logo a new spin and incorporating it into a few simple (yet flexible enough) design rules is an enjoyable professional challenge for most designers. But that’s most likely not the corporate goal and as such off-limits.

Instead the corporate goal is to throw everything out and replace it with a purple sperm. It wouldn’t have been much worse had they chosen a brown poop emoji instead. It really is (and was) that terrible. And the entire community feels the same.

Perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to talk a bit about myself: Admittedly, I’m not too avid of an Audacity user. In fact, I learned of Tantacrul via Musescore and have seen the UltimateGuitar playbook play out on Musescore with my own eyes and felt its consequences on my own skin. It’s a terrible feeling.

I’ve seen Tantacrul’s Musescore video 2 weeks after it first aired. A few videos later, Tabtacrul announced that he’d become the head designer for the app. I was extatic and had high hopes for the app which were very much met. At first.

Things turned south quickly with new management. It’s a terrible feeling. In fact, Musescore is a large part of the reason why I became such a vocal FOSS advocate. I wouldn’t wish what happened to Musescore and its users to my worst enemies.

To move away from me and olback onto Audacity, there’s also the “CLA thing”. You can see the drama firsthand on GitHub (link). But what I’d specifically like to point out is not the main post (read the first paragraph and skim the rest, it isn’t worth reading), but rather the comments under it which do a good job at disspelling the talking points used in the post itself. The commenters over there are much more competent at linking good sources than me, so please feel free to click on some.

That being said, this entire situation with both Audacity and MuseScore is part of a larger trend of “corporate FOSS takeovers” where FOSS projects get taken over by new management, a bunch of work gets done in a few years and then the projects stop being FOSS via various nefarious means.

A nice example of past corporate FOSS takeovers is listed quite nicely here, but it doesn’t give any nuance nor list the common strategies used, or how both the app and its users are harmed by that.

There’s also a nice discussion over on lemmy.ca (this one), but it requires quite a bit of background in FOSS terminology to be fully graspable.

Some more info on the Audacity situation is also listed here, and a more lenghty discussion is available on the forum “Hacker News” (link).

Hope these links feed at least some inquisitive minds.

First, it was never meant to be opt in.

Second, that’s like saying you don’t see the problem with the Nuremberg laws.

Taken out of context, they’re bad.

Taken in context, they’re the first step towards something much, much worse.

And when such a canary in the coalmine dies the rational response is to not understand how it died and proceed further down the mine.

The dev team changed. Audacity wasn’t always maintianed by Musescore, it was its own thing.

They aren’t responsible for what Audacity was or what it in essence is. They did not create the app nor maintain it for most of its existance. New management is only a few years old.

What new management is responsible for is the new features during their tenure, the redesign and turning Audacity into a shill for their online service.

There wouldn’t be any under-new-management-Audacity without old Audacity just as Tenacity.

So saying something like what you did makes little sense and belittles Tenacity developers while raising new shills to the status of founding fathers.

Well yes. Publishers of physical books absolutely cannot not put a piece of explosive inside their physical book, whose only point is to burn the book once said publisher claims it’s impossible to not set off the explosive after 25 years of “support”.

Neither games nor gamers don’t need “support”. What they need is to not actively be belittled, castrated and mutilated by publishers.

If this was done in the physical realm wirh equivalent tactics, there’d also be outrage.

It’s a both-ways situation.

They allow only the Fisher-Price version of phones so less-than-power-users don’t do something stupid.

They also allow only Fisher-Price so power users can’t beat Celebrite as easily.