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Free open source AUDACITY acquired by MUSE GROUP


aidan o driscoll

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https://www.musicradar.com/news/ultimate-guitar-owner-music-group-acquires-audacity-pledging-to-keep-it-free-and-open-source

There’s been a whole lot of moving and shaking going on in the audio industry just recently - Native Instruments’ alliance with iZotope and Focusrite’s purchase of Dave Smith’s Sequential synth brand to name just a couple of major developments - and now it’s been confirmed that the newly-founded Muse Group, which also owns Ultimate Guitar, has acquired Audacity, the popular free and open-source audio editor.

The intention is to keep it FREE and OPEN SOURCE:

“And just like we’re doing at MuseScore, we’re now planning on significantly improving the feature set and ease of use of Audacity - providing dedicated designers and developers to give it the attention it deserves - while keeping it free and open-source.”

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5 hours ago, aidan o driscoll said:

https://www.musicradar.com/news/ultimate-guitar-owner-music-group-acquires-audacity-pledging-to-keep-it-free-and-open-source

There’s been a whole lot of moving and shaking going on in the audio industry just recently - Native Instruments’ alliance with iZotope and Focusrite’s purchase of Dave Smith’s Sequential synth brand to name just a couple of major developments - and now it’s been confirmed that the newly-founded Muse Group, which also owns Ultimate Guitar, has acquired Audacity, the popular free and open-source audio editor.

The intention is to keep it FREE and OPEN SOURCE:

“And just like we’re doing at MuseScore, we’re now planning on significantly improving the feature set and ease of use of Audacity - providing dedicated designers and developers to give it the attention it deserves - while keeping it free and open-source.”

So Muse acquired a thing they intend to keep giving away FREE. Not sure what was involved in the "acquiring" ? It's a business plan I don't quite understand.

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2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I wonder if their forum is now going to blow up with people freaking out that Muse may at some point make it payware. 'Cause, y'know, companies aren't in business to lose money and those "dedicated designers and developers" don't work for free. ^_^

I'm sure that if they ever created a proprietary version, all that would happen is that someone would fork the last free version of the source on Git and continue it as an open source project.

Also, there are plenty of companies that own and maintain open source software, e.g. Facebook and React; Microsoft and .NET Core/VS Code

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2 hours ago, Starise said:

So Muse acquired a thing they intend to keep giving away FREE. Not sure what was involved in the "acquiring" ? It's a business plan I don't quite understand.

Maybe they became admins of the source code repository. It's possible they wanted to acquire it so that they can commit new code into it at a much faster rate, as they are able to approve the code merges themselves instead of waiting for someone else with less dedicated time to approve them.

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3 hours ago, Starise said:

 It's a business plan I don't quite understand.

I would have to agree.

 

56 minutes ago, antler said:

It's possible they wanted to acquire it so that they can commit new code into it at a much faster rate, as they are able to approve the code merges themselves instead of waiting for someone else with less dedicated time to approve them.

Sounds like you may be on the inside!! : )

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3 hours ago, Starise said:

Muse acquired a thing they intend to keep giving away FREE. Not sure what was involved in the "acquiring" ? It's a business plan I don't quite understand.

Cakewalk'd.

Audacity is often the first DAW that people start working with. In my second go-round, that was the case with me. I went as far as successfully compiling the ASIO build on my home Windows system.

People who have easy, free access to music-making software and are therefore encouraged to go further with making music will spend money on a company's other products. Witness my own experience with the Meldaproduction FreeFXBundle. Years ago I downloaded the bundle and used MCompressor and MEqualizer to learn how to mix. At this point I own licenses for 56 of their plug-ins and continue to recommend them to people.

The idea is that significant enough percentage of Audacity users will become MuseScore users to make the project worthwhile. As with Cakewalk, there may eventually be builds with greater integration with MuseScore and their other products. MuseScore for notation and MIDI, Audacity for audio. It's probable that Audacity will become a download option when someone buys MuseScore.

My .02.

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1 hour ago, Grem said:

Sounds like you may be on the inside!! : )

Not me - I've just written enough code to realise that waiting for merges can be bad for productivity and product improvement speed.

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6 hours ago, Starise said:

So Muse acquired a thing they intend to keep giving away FREE. Not sure what was involved in the "acquiring" ? It's a business plan I don't quite understand.

Me too! An open source product acquiring another? I fail to see a business plan in that... although that might make sense from a development resources standpoint.

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52 minutes ago, InstrEd said:

Meng acquired Cakewalk and has made it free to all on a Windows platform  :D

When some folks have the resources it always isn't about making the most $$$.   

Funny how FL users are afraid Image-Line is going to go belly up over free lifetime updates.  Despite the 30,00+ replies from the IL staff that their model is working users need have this insecurity.   If acquired by Gibson then it is time to worry.

 

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