We chat with Martin Keary about the new features of Audacity, managing a community and the pitfalls of telemetry.

Image credit: Muse Group

For over 20 years, Audacity has been the leading crossplatform, open source audio F editor, with that instantly recognisable orange and blue headphone logo. Like many open source projects, it was created out of the need to solve an unusual problem: co-founders professor Roger Dannenberg and Dominic Mazzoni’s requirement for an adept cross-platform audio visualisation tool to help with their Query by Humming research, among other audio oddities.

In 2021, Audacity was acquired by Muse Group and almost instantly ran into controversy over the introduction of telemetry and a new privacy policy. Since then, however, Muse Group has progressed Audacity’s development with muchrequested real-time effects, a seemingly unstoppable progression towards being a full audio-production suite and even an updated icon. We talked to Martin Keary, product owner at Audacity, about introducing new features, new policies and a new interface, plus the dangers of skeuomorphism and Ubuntu Unity design.

LINUX FORMAT We DuckDuckGoed your name and discovered your YouTube channel, which has a fantastic video about the history and background of Audacity, in which you interview its original creators.

MARTIN KEARY That was fantastic for me. Being a YouTuber who is interested in music technology and stories about audio, it was great to talk to the founders. I saw the kind of passion they put into it and learned about some of the characters involved. I also discovered all kinds of things about the app itself and why it came to be the way it was.

LXF Are those original developers still fully engaged in the project?

MK Dominic and Roger handed over the keys about a decade ago to a second crew. Of those, one member of the old team is still full-time on the project with us (Muse Group). There’s quite a few others who aren’t with us full-time but they’re actively engaged on the forum and testing side of things. There’s one person who is almost solely responsible for the testing and pushing of accessibility features, and he’s fantastic.

LXF What was it in your background that led to you being involved with Audacity?

MK I’ve always been a musician, ever since I was a kid. When it came to deciding what I wanted to do at university, I was already a musician playing in bands, so I opted to pursue my other skill, which was draughtmanship and other types of visual artwork. So I decided to study graphic design initially.