I had a last minute request from a client to cut and paste audio into a mp3 file. No worries I thought! Audacity is just the program for the job so I went ahead and downloaded it, and was surprised when something called muse hub was installed instead. I went back to the download page, and was annoyed when I saw the option “Download without Muse Hub” below the main download page. This seems predatory to me as there was no information about muse hub on the page. Most people would’ve pressed the Main download page without a second thought just like me not knowing that they just installed bloatware on their computer. People want Audacity, not Muse Hub. Also, something odd I noticed is opening Audacity.org for the first time prompts you with the screen of “download Audacity” with the “download without music hub option” below it, but when you have opened the website before you instead get the page “Download On Music hub” and below it “other versions”. I would have WAY MORE preferred the second page. Moving on towards the actual program itself it frankly sucked, the tools were unintuitive, moving a short mp3 track was not smooth on my M2 Pro mac, I had trouble zooming in with two clips present. It made the experience of cutting and pasting a short clip massively frustrating to the point that after I finished editing the clip, I made an account to complain and write this post. I know that the Audacity team is trying their best and I don’t wanna shit all over you guys but please improve Audacity. -Octavio M
I am using Audacity on Mac for many, many years, and I never had any major problems. If you could specify what exactly is your problem and not just complaining with many words abour not so many things, you probably would receive reasonable and helpful answers. But this way…?
For the most part, I think you’re right. It is decidedly underhand to operate that way. Audacity is free but Muse has other products/services which are not. They are just like other businesses, they want your money. As for using Audacity, it takes time to learn like any other software.
It’s been the same for downloading Audacity for Mac or Windows for quite a while. “Muse Hub” is a software downloader for Muse Group products. Muse Group became the owners of Audacity in 2021.
If you can recognise the file name to match your operating system, Audacity (without muse hub or anything else) can be downloaded directly from the official GitHub repository: Releases · audacity/audacity · GitHub .
