Introducing a UUID System in Audacity – Here’s What You Need to Know

Dear Audacity Community,

We’d like to inform you about an update to Audacity we’re planning for late February: the introduction of a UUID system, which assigns a random number to your version of Audacity. Here’s is a clear breakdown of what this means and why we’re implementing it.

Audacity will now generate random numbers to construct a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) for each version of the app. Here’s how we’ll use it:

  • Understand daily and monthly active users – to get a clearer picture of how widely Audacity is used.
  • Track retention rates – to see how many users return after their first session which helps us identify opportunities to improve the experience. At present, we do not know what the ‘fall off’ rate is for the app, so are unable to tell what % of our users find the app satisfying enough to return. Understanding this relationship will massively help us prioritise the features we implement.
  • Audio.com integration insights – for users already registered with Audio.com, this system will help us understand how often Audacity users take advantage of Audio.com. We will not be sharing any other kinds of information with Audio.com, apart from the UUID itself.

It’s important to note that UUIDs, while random, are considered ‘personal information’ under GDPR. We take this seriously and will reflect this in our updated Privacy Policy, which we will publish next week ahead of the update in February. However, this UUID is not linked to any personally identifiable information about you.

When you launch Audacity after the update, you’ll be provided with clear options to accept or decline the sharing of this data.

  • If you opt out, no UUID will be transmitted to our servers.

Our aim is simply to better understand how Audacity is used so we can improve it, and to assess the effectiveness of our integration with Audio.com for those who choose to use both services. We are not collecting identifiable information, and your privacy remains a top priority.

If you have questions, concerns, or suggestions about this change, please don’t hesitate to share them here. We’re committed to maintaining trust with our community and being as transparent as possible.

For those interested, we plan to use V4 of the UUID protocol. UUID v4 does not base itself on any system-specific or sensitive information (e.g., MAC addresses, timestamps, or IP addresses).

Thank you,
– The Audacity Team

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I don’t understand.

Users of Audacity, or users of Audio.com? If I opt in, is the UUID sent from Audacity every time I launch the app, or only if I upload to Audio.com?

I try each release of Audacity, and also some pre-release versions, but I’m still using Audacity 2.4.2 for production work. If I opt in to this scheme, what will the UUID’s tell you about my usage?

Will this be implemented for all platforms, or only Windows?

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If one opts in, the UUID will be shared each time Audacity is opened. The only data that is stored is a timestamp for that specific UUID and that’s it. In this way, we know what our retention is, which also tells us our daily active usage and monthly active usage.

For example, we could see that a UUID used Audacity 4 times in a week. No other info is shared.

With Audio.com, if you’ve signed up to the service, then the UUID would be shared and associated with your Audio.com account.

This is planned for Win & Mac. We would ideally use the same system everywhere but we could look at disabling it for Linux.

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What if I’m using it on a PC that at the moment does NOT have internet? Will your UUID check hang my program and/or system?

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Good question. No, nothing like that will happen. If there’s no connection, Audacity will just work as expected.

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