I remember how brilliant Audacity was. I remember we just opened it and used it and it all worked fine. The makers created a fine product back then. Now it is this… HEY! GET OUR LATEST COMMERCIALLY LACED WONDER PRODUCT!! YOU CANNOT SURVIVE WITHOUT US!!! Yes, join the cloud based, massively commercial exploiters who make you want every plugin to grab your money!! THESE GREAT NEW FEATURES CANNOT BE LEFT ALONE!!! Come to the purple MuseHuib which we will install all over your Windows system and FORCE ON YOU (as much as possible at least) our AMAAAAZING costly products, getting you to BUY BUY BUY!!!
You know what…? Hooky copy of the old Cool Edit Pro 2.1 I think…
Man! Oh Man! Audacity reeks of commercial manipulation and greedy gain… So it is not BUY BUY BUY!! It is BYE BYE BYE…!
It’s still open source and free. I’m running the latest version without any extras and without using the cloud or signing-up with Muse.
Plus, the old versions are still available.
Back in those days, I chose GoldWave over Cool Edit (mostly because you got the full-version and you didn’t have to pay extra for the “pro” version) and with all that’s happened to Cool Edit/Audition I’m happy I did!!! I still have GoldWave and the lifetime license with free upgrades for all those years.
Overall, Audacity has more features but GoldWave has a few things that Audacity doesn’t and GoldWave has been “rock solid”. It’s not updated nearly as frequently as Audacity but it’s still kept up to date. It was last updated about a month ago.
I also started with Cool Edit, then I moved over to Linux and found an open source alternative: Audacity. During my time as part of the Audacity team, the ease of use if Cool Edit was a source of inspiration, and as a musician I wanted Audacity to be even better.
Eventually Cool Edit became Audition. The price shot up and the first couple of versions (which I used at work) were horrible. Gradually it improved, but by then it had moved to a subscription model that was out of my price range. By this time, I actually preferred Audacity, and found it much quicker to use than Audition - an essential quality when working under time pressure in the studio.
Sadly I find Audacity significantly slower to use than before, but hopefully this will improve over time.
Audacity itself is still free and open source, and nearly all of the older versions are still available. I don’t use any of the paid offerings so I can’t really comment, though the “cloud storage” seems rather expensive compared to the price of USB thumb drives.
