Audacity 4.0: the Qt rewrite, clip by clip

Audacity 4.0 shipped on 3 September, and it is the biggest rebuild in the editor's history. The interface moved from wxWidgets to Qt 6. Every toolbar, panel and meter was redrawn. It shows. The app that taught a generation to cut audio, from bedroom podcasters to radio editors who still swear by its shortcuts, now looks like a proper studio.

The headline change is the clip model. Clips can be selected by clicking their header, grouped, and moved between mono and stereo tracks. Trim and stretch handles sit on the clip itself. Drag one clip over another and it replaces the overlap instead of blocking the move. Split has a dedicated tool: hold S, click the waveform, done. Paste now creates a track when one is needed, and pulls audio files straight from the operating system clipboard, which means dragging a recording in from your file manager just works.

The interface is fully dockable now. Toolbars float, panels dock, layouts save as Workspaces. Audacity ships Modern, Classic and Music presets; Music swaps the ruler to bars and beats at 120 bpm, which makes the DAW side of the tool visible for the first time. Light, dark and high-contrast themes come with accent colors and per-track colors. The old four tool modes are gone, folded into context-sensitive behavior: zoom into a waveform and you can drag samples directly.

Under the hood, plugin support now covers VST3, Nyquist, LV2 on Linux and Audio Units on macOS, so the effect chains you already own keep working without a migration. Official Windows builds gain ASIO playback and recording. The spectrogram was redrawn with cleaner rulers and faster rendering. Projects save in the new .aup4 format; .aup3 projects open and convert without touching the original file.

Not everything crossed over. Time tracks, MIDI tracks, the Macro Manager and scripting pipe, and LADSPA hosting are not in 4.0 yet. The team says they are coming in future releases. On Hacker News the release drew 1,072 points in a day, with the usual split between long-time users mourning the old interface and newcomers calling it a glow-up.

Audacity is 25 years old this year, free, open source under GPL, and still the honest starting point for anyone editing sound on any operating system, with no account and no cloud required. The full release notes and downloads are on GitHub: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases/tag/Audacity-4.0.0

■ Filed from The Foundry: the Fern, Fire wing of the city.