Audacity adds AI audio editing capabilities thanks to free Intel OpenVINO plugins

[Edit: indeed, its actually good that it's 2gb]
2gb plugin??!
Btw, does it work with tenacity?
- AI models are often multiple gigabytes, tbh it's a good sign that it's not "AI" marketing bullshit (less of a risk with open source projects anyway). I'm pretty wary of "AI" audio software that's only a few megabytes.
  
  Tensorflowlite models are tiny, but they're potentially as much an audio revolution as synthetizer were in the 70s. It's hard to tell if that's what we're looking at here.
  
  Why are they that big? Is it more than code? How could you get to gigabytes of code?
- It seems reasonable given it includes multiple AI models.
- 2gb is pretty normal for an AI model. I have some small LLM models on my PC and they're about 7-10gb big. The big ones take up even more space.
- Isn’t tenacity a joke project made by 4channers
  
  That fork is sneedacity, which is very dead.
  
  Tenacity is a Audacity fork without telemetry

I thought audacity was tarnished with spyware or something these days. Is it safe again?
- What? You must be joking. Really? The entire thing was about opt-in error reporting?
  .... seriously, that can't be it, can it?
  
  Point a has always me me wonder, is that accurate? Are there actually people going through the code to make sure open source isn't malicious? I can barely read my coworkers code... Let alone a strangers.
  
  That's not entirely true, Audacity was acquired by a company called MuseGroup who added unnecessary telemetry and they admit that they do provide the data the collect to third parties. It's spyware as far as I'm concerned.
- It was a pull request to add opt-out analytics that got blown out of proportion, where the real issue was the EULA and how tonedeaf of a move it was considering the community around Audacity. IIRC, they ended up replacing it with opt-in analytics.
- Not really, but there is a fork called tenacity which fixes this

I've been using the OpenVINO plugins for a few weeks and it's genuinely impressive. Noise cancelling is one thing, but the transcription tool is amazing. I can create subtitles from conference recordings in minutes and create transcripts of recorded zoom calls, etc. and it does it for multiple languages.
That's the kind of shit I like using AI for.
- music generation and remixing
  any insight as to what this is?

The music separation and speech transcription plug-ins actually sound nice. Obviously that will depend on how reliable they actually are.
- deleted by creator

I read "Audacity ads" and thought for a moment they had gone to the dark side
- We already had a scare with them, but turns out it was very unfair overreaction to the project.
  In this case I'm happy as long as it's hardware platform independent and uses open source released models.
  AI music art has been for a long time in the hands of industry moguls and us peasants have had nothing. So I'm happy with anything that puts this power in the hands of the everyman.
  
  Was it unfair? I haven't been following since they got bought out by spyware?
  EDIT: Audacity was acquired by a company called MuseGroup in 2021 who added unnecessary telemetry and they admit that they do provide the data the collect to third parties. Some claim the changes were reverted but I haven't confirmed that myself so until I see there is no telemetry it's spyware as far as I'm concerned.

Use Tenacity instead
- Why?
  Edit: I see now. https://tenacityaudio.org/docs/_content/Motivation.html
- What's the difference?
  
  In April 2021, Muse Group acquired the famous audio editing applicaiton Audacity. Their goals for Audacity were to bring much needed improvements to Audacity. However, not too long after, there was an attempt to add telemetry to the program

Windows only :(
- According to the repo, it builds fine on Linux. They just don't distribute a binary for it.
  https://github.com/intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity/issues/27
  
  It's already on the AUR
- Presumably you could use it in a VM running Windows

I'm sure I used to use Audacity back in the day as a free, quick and dirty editor to splice up audio tracks. I'm talking at least 10 years ago.
Had no idea it was still even a thing.
- It's honestly pretty much the industry standard for indie creators. There's nothing super flashy about it, it just does its job very well.
  This along with 7-zip and OBS and the like have been pretty impressive success stories for FOSS, even if most of their users don't even know what that means.
- They got acquired in 2021 so a lot of people have been very skeptical about it lately.

Oh boy this is what I always wanted woooo

...and Audacity for Windows 64-bit is required to run these plugins.
Useless.
- On lemme I'm often reminded of the vegan joke:
  How do you tell if someone is a Linux user? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
- Having no need for over 4gb of RAM?

I wonder if it can "de-brickwall" music now
- De-brickwall?
  Edit: Googled it.
  
  Wanna share with the rest of the class?

Awesome, useful features if they work well. I'll have to try it out.

Was the training data ethically sourced (for music generation)?
How do music creators feel about their work potentially being regenerated and used in other's works?
- Considering copyright is unethical to begin with...
  
  I could almost agree but I think there is value in copyleft: a hack of copyright to ensure users have some of the rights copyright denies when you get a copy/derivative work from another.
  With no copyright it's great that you won't be sued if you share software but in practice a mere binary isn't enough (reverse engineering is impractical). We need the source code to be able to change it (or understand what it's even doing). I won't support removing all copyright law without a solution.
- Define ethically sourced.
  
  Free range grass fed.
  
  Getting permission to copy each music work for use in training data may be ethically important while the creators are dependant on income from that work to survive, or just as a social contract.
- How do music creators feel about their work potentially being regenerated and used in other’s works?
  They can always discuss that with their psychologists! :)

Audacity just doesn't seem worth the trouble after discovering Reaper and how powerful it is for only $60.
- I'm a sound engineer and I use different DAWs for different purposes. There's just no one DAW that does all, so this is a compromise I'm happy to go with.
  When I do podcast editing, I use Audacity to split multi-track WAV files and for truncating silence. It's just waaaay easier to do this there than on Reaper. Plus it has a loopback recording feature built-in which I use for Zoom meeting recordings etc.
  I use Pro Tools for audio post, but for most of what I do I'm a Reaper guy. It's very powerful as you said and it just works.
  I know it can be a hassle switching DAWs (muscle memory on shortcuts can get weird), but for me, I like making the most of the strengths of a tool rather than forcing something to do everything.
  
  That's awesome!
  I learned DAWs with ProTools back around 2006 in college. Dropped out because I didn't want to enter a competitive trade where my best opportunities were moving out of state.
  Got sucked into another industry and haven't touched much audio for the past decade. Getting back into it now and started on Audacity but the 2021 buyout had me confused where to land with the Tenacity split. the good/bad of open source I suppose but as a user being in the middle of a split was frustrating and detracting from recording. Finding out about Reaper and talking to people leaving ProTools behind even within the industry was just what I needed when I needed it.
  My daughter (11yo) is now getting into DAWs as her current goal is to score an internship at KEXP, being able to share with her all the stuff I learned in school has been so much fun.
- I see what you mean, in your case as well as mine, Reaper is far more powerful and so far more adequate to our needs But people do not always search for powerful software. Sometimes they only want something easy to learn, with only basic tasks but well performed and entirely free. When you have these requirements, Audacity is better
  
  Audacity is a great learning tool for intro absolutely! When you're just dipping your toes into recording and editing, free and $60 is a huge difference.
  I feel like users that are going to be using any of the features of this plug-in, they're probably at the point that going to Reaper makes sense.
- Does Reaper have similar AI tools? Not a dig, a real question.
  
  Not at the moment, from what I know

- Why is that?