Audacity has added AI audio editing capabilities thanks to Intel’s free OpenVINO plugins. These plugins add AI-powered noise suppression, speech transcription, music generation and remixing, and music separation to the freeware sound editor and are available for download today.
Audacity was already in the trash since the buyout and telemetry data collection.
I never understood the opposition to anonymized telemetry. While adding an entire network stack for it is certainly quite atrocious, there’s no problem with the principle I can see.
Some people prefer to not have their every action watched and observed by some anonymous Big brother.
The people who do not get that are the people who profit from the watching, and the people that are, best case, inconsiderate of the desires and feelings of other people.
It is not normal nor is it natural to claim ownership of other people’s activity.
It is normal and natural to wish to exist without being observed. Privacy is a fundamental human right and companies are taking advantage of the fact that it is not legally enforced.
Hopefully the laws will catch up and make it so that each and every individual opportunity to directly observe a person must be explicitly approved beforehand with a set time limit on the observation, and that all telemetry must be made publically available and transparent, not only during the original acquisition of data but also in each and every single usage of that data after the fact.
It is only fair after all that should accompany wish to observe you that they must also be equally observed.
But if you anonymize the data, does it really mean someone has their every action watched in a harmful way?
This is an odd place to grand stand. I’m glad you have ideals, but the fact is Audacity was looking to gather industry standard telemetry data (basic system information and crashes) as an opt-in system. This information is extremely important in fixing bugs and prioritising developer resources.
And I could see the forest a whole lot better if all these trees weren’t in the way.
It’s not that one person is doing it it’s that everyone is doing it.
The only way to stop everyone from doing it is to stop everyone from doing it.
It’s pretty clear from my argument that I believe that it is entirely legitimate and unproblematic for everyone to collect basic data like system information and crashes. I’m not making an exception for Audacity, I’m broadly accepting this behaviour.
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