Audacity has changed quite a bit recently. Not just in its UI layout, but also in its philosophy of presentation and processing. At least to me, it feels that way. Which make me question if the development team has changed, or if something else has happened. My direct question is: Has Audacity been acquired by a private firm or company, or has ownership, or control of it been taken over by another group within the last year or so?
Audacity has been acquired my Muse Group in April 2021.
Yes. It used to be run as a volunteer group effort from the world headquarters in Land’s End, Great Britain.
I’m one of the odd ducks on the US west coast. I think it’s still 6 hours time shift, right?
Yes, a corporation in, I think, Russia, acquired us in, ummm, I don’t remember the date. It’s still free, as far as I know and we still drop in now and again to help out.
The company still doesn’t have a formal Help Desk.
That’s actually Dockweiler RV Park, a stone’s throw from LAX on one of the five cloudy and rainy days that year. I had my camera with me.
Koz
Thank you for the information. It does explain a few things.
Thank you so much for your replay. It’s good to know. I knew something changed, and some of the changes didn’t seem to track with the base product design. Muse. Russia, Great.
Thanks again.
Muse Group (MuseCY Holdings Ltd.) is a Cypriot software and education company specialised in making tools and resources for music composition, music production and music education. Established in 1998 as Ultimate Guitar, it became Muse Group in 2021 following several acquisitions such as MuseScore and Audacity.
See Wikipedia.
Koz, do you happen to remember if you sold it to the old “WSM Group” legal entity (in Kaliningrad), “Ultimate Guitar” (which does have a USA entity) or the new Muse Group one? I’ve had one of Muse’s lawyers lunge at me with a cease and desist for, among other things, daring to suggest that Audacity got sold to what then was a Russian company.
They are going to need to copy Fender and send a lot of those letters given how many people have said the same thing. The two founders are Russian and they have Russian developers despite the Cyprus HQ. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck…
Fwiw, the Audacity team itself isn’t very Russian, and in fact is probably one of the most amazing teams I’ve ever worked with. It’s the rest of the company I don’t understand:
Amazon spent an enormous amount of money creating the “flywheel”, a system that sucks you in with an impossibly cheap free-shipping subscription to keep customers around for as long as possible and then sucks in more sellers and yet more customers.
Muse meanwhile hides the Audacity download button to drive more traffic to the musehub, preventing people from using audacity directly, and using, in my opinion, dark patterns to trick people into subscriptions which has tons of folks cancel as soon as they realize they got tricked. Do they not realise it’s counter productive? I’ve told them as much…
3 Likes
A post was merged into an existing topic: Audacity 4 in the browser