What the hell happened to Audacity?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I sometimes used Audacity in the 00’s to amplify a weak mp3 audio. I even used Audacity in the early 90’s.

I went to get it tonight and the worthless POS snuck MusicHub on my laptop

Whatever the hell that is.

Damn, bastards

We can’t even rely on the oldest and most reliable shareware anymore without getting screwed? I have a Audacity book guide on my shelf. Learned to edit music from that book.

I uninstalled that MusicHub shit and rebooted.

They installed it in my Startup folder. Virus check never warned me.

Sorry for the profanity. I hate being played for a fool.

I went back and confirmed that I was on their offical page. The so called download page has several confusing links to trick people into downloading something besides Audacity.

I’m getting old and my eyes aren’t good on glaring computer screens. They wouldn’t have tricked me 15 years ago.

2

Right on their main page, right at the top, there is a clear option to download the program without Muse Hub.

3

I clicked the 64 bit and 32 bit for windows button. The Recommended installer. I used to always install shareware manually from a Zip file. But decided Audacity is such a trusted, legacy program that I could use their installer.

I thought that I hit the right download button.

My eyes, since cataract surgery just don’t focus as well on glaring monitors.

My fault, I guess for being over confident and not vigilant for tricks.

I pray Music Hub is only malware and not a virus :folded_hands:

It’s uninstalled now.

4

Is this “Music Hub” a different program than the “Muse Hub” they mention on the web page?

5

My typo. It’s Muse Hub. I just looked at the exe in my download folder to confirm.

6

Then by what I can read it is neither a virus nor is it malware, at least not by any definition I can find.
Audacity ® | Introducing Muse Hub

7

Thank you @Czarcasm

That was a bad scare. I’m just now configuring this laptop with all my favorite software. I have a lot of work flow planned. I’m taking a online Python class. I’ll key in and test programs.

It would be horrible to infect my work laptop on week 2.

8

As far as I know, if you want to add effects/plugins to Audacity, they live on MuseHub. Not a virus.

9

Thank you

I will go back and very, very carefully try again. Triple check the name of the exe.

Audacity is the only Audio Editor that I ever actually studied and learned from a Idiots Guide Book.

10

They were bought by MuseGroup a few years ago (a music conglomerate that also owns MuseScore, Ultimate Guitar, the publisher Hal Leonard, and other properties).

Audacity was never shareware, really (it never had a for-pay full version). Rather, it was and is free and open-source, but that takes a lot of time and resources. It’s often a thankless job with the community demanding a lot of things for free. Sometimes developers burn out and the projects sell out or get sponsored, and ads like the MuseGroup crap are what you get if you accidentally choose the wrong downloader. In this case, at least the base program is still free and available and you can choose the version without MuseHub, but it’s not as obvious.

A lot of programs start out free but end up this way, sadly. Free software is a really hard to sustain ecosystem.

11

That’s very interesting. Thanks

I haven’t actively edited any audio in several years.

Audacity dropped off my computers a decade ago. Tonight was the first time that I needed it again.

For a 2 min job to amplify a weak audio track. :grinning_face:

I wanted to use a program that wouldn’t resample the digital audio. Preserves what’s there and amplify 15+ to 20 db.

I know it has to convert the mp3 to wav or Flac. I may leave it in flac. I think going back to mp3 means resample?

The original mp3 is 128kbps. Junk, really. Compared to 320kbps.

12

It’s still the same program, just bundled with adware if you chose the wrong downloader.

There’s also an online, install-less version that runs in your browser at https://wavacity.com/ (it was an older version of Audacity, “forked” by a different developer in 2022).

13

What do you mean by “resample”? Like bitrate, or…?

MP3 is a compression scheme, so yes, decompressing it and recompressing it back to MP3 will result in quality loss (usually imperceptible if you keep the same settings, but there nonetheless). Even your “original” MP3 is lossy; you’re making a copy of a copy, essentially.

If you go from MP3 to FLAC, there isn’t additional quality loss, but you’re still working with the limited, already-compressed information in the MP3. If you want to keep the highest quality, you’ll have to find either the original uncompressed audio or at least a high-quality compressed version (bitrate, sampling rate, etc.)

14

You can also try to use AI-assisted upsampling before amplification, like openvino-plugins-ai-audacity/doc/feature_doc/super_resolution/README.md at main · intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity · GitHub

15

There’s not much I can do. It’s an old Alison Krauss recording. Be Thou My Vision

I’ve searched everywhere trying to find out where it was officially released. The YouTuber didn’t say and it was posted 9 years ago.

Back then the YouTube upload would compress everything heavily.

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You can hear the problem. I can’t hear the guitar clearly enough to transcribe and learn it.

I have a really good program. Moises that uses AI to remove the vocal.

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I’m not sure if that’s the same recording as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub56L5AYyEM (which has a slight period of background at the beginning, but otherwise looks the same to me):

Your version is at the top and the other YouTube video is below it… they look the same to my untrained eye:

Anyhow, I don’t know if you saw this already, but yt-dlp says there’s a 137 kbps / 48 kHz Opus track in both of those versions (yt-dlp is an open source YouTube track downloader):

If all you have is a 128kbps MP3, the Opus is probably higher quality? Worth a try? You can compare their spectrograms to the MP3 version you have to see if there’s a significant quality difference.

I’ll try the Audacity separation too and see how it goes.

18

Like minds here today. Replay Media does a similar task.

I saw that opus file and didn’t know how to use it. Didn’t know its quality and picked the 128kbps mp3.

Any help is appreciated. I’m rusty at digital audio and my knowledge is slightly out of date.

I’m supposed to perform Be Thou My Vision with a group in church. I won’t be singing.

I can sing, but I’m definitely not Alison Krauss. That woman has a gifted voice.

She starts that song, A cappella. Gutsy choice. I’ll strum a chord to start our performance and establish the key for our vocalist.

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I’ll do my best. Give me a few min.

And yeah, that lady has an amazing voice! Enya-esque.

20

I DMed you a couple of files, both the downloaded Opus file (which Audacity should be able to open directly, as long you already have ffmpeg installed… Opus is just a newer, better audio codec than MP3) and the version I processed with Audacity (using the OpenVino music separation and loudness compression plugins).

The result is louder but far from perfect. Hopefully enough to learn from, though?

The music separation wasn’t great. If you can run the Opus through your separator and send me back the guitar track, I can try again (or just play around with the Loudness plugins in Audacity yourself… the Compressor with the Acoustic Guitar preset is a good starting point, and you can tweak the make-up gain further there). I don’t know what all the settings do either, but ChatGPT is pretty good at walking you through them.

There’s also other people’s transcribed chords available, e.g. at BE THOU MY VISION CHORDS (ver 3) by Misc Praise Songs @ Ultimate-Guitar.Com or an AI version at Be Thou My Vision - Alison Krauss Chords - ChordU