Audacity now considered spyware

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billybudapest
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Audacity now considered spyware

Post by billybudapest »

Take 5 minutes and read the full article...

"The parent company is a multi-national company and it has been trying to start a data-collection mechanism in the software. While Audacity is nothing more than a desktop program, its developers want to make it phone home with various data taken from users’ machines."


https://fosspost.org/audacity-is-now-a-spyware/
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alphabeatles
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Re: Audacity now considered spyware

Post by alphabeatles »

Thanks for the heads-up! Everything is getting so ugly now...

Aside from the possible fork, maybe if we don't update the current version we are good?
Yellowsubmarine
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Re: Audacity now considered spyware

Post by Yellowsubmarine »

That's weird.
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alphabeatles
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Re: Audacity now considered spyware

Post by alphabeatles »

From what I can tell, v3.0.2 (the latest) precedes this nonsense (maybe! It's not clear whether v3 already contained the code prior to the acquisition or whether this will be true going forward). Linux folks at least are doing their own edits of the code and moving forward without the worry (though further development may suffer as a result).

This company also owns Tonebridge (the free guitar-amp emulator), which is also sad. Not sure if it is spyware as well...
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Lord Reith
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Re: Audacity now considered spyware

Post by Lord Reith »

Typical. A great open source program gets taken over by a greedy bunch of dickheads who want to exploit it to mine data.

Fortunately there is not really any need to update it. It's worked just fine for the last five years. I always ignore the updates these days. More likely to break things than help.
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Rave O Lucien
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Re: Audacity now considered spyware

Post by Rave O Lucien »

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Tex
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Re: Audacity now considered spyware

Post by Tex »

I bought a batch HTML editor like 20 years ago and recently when I clicked *About* to see if it was maybe updated it redirected me to a bogus site. So, I guess some spammer renewed the domain after the program was discontinued. Be careful with old software that can open URLs.
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Re: Audacity now considered spyware

Post by WilliamShears »

Someone has archived one of the last stable versions before the TOS changed here, though if you’ve already got a working version, I’d just keep it rolling.

https://archive.org/details/audacity-2.4.2
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Re: Audacity now considered spyware

Post by mojofilter »

Whew! Dodged a bullet there. I'm using 2.3.2. I never used it before I read elsewhere that you can record the audio from YouTube videos through your sound card as they play, in Audacity.
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alphabeatles
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Re: Audacity now considered spyware

Post by alphabeatles »

mojofilter wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 4:02 am Whew! Dodged a bullet there. I'm using 2.3.2. I never used it before I read elsewhere that you can record the audio from YouTube videos through your sound card as they play, in Audacity.
Maybe more efficient to use ClipGrab or similar, grab the video quickly, then open it in a sound editor. No need for real-time recording (unless it's a stream of course).

PS: I meant to quote your post and reported it instead! ;-)

WilliamShears, please disregard...
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