Audacity Caution telemetry data collection

Open source friends are upset as the popular app gets new management. This would not be a problem if the new administrators did not add some features to the popular telemetry data collection application.

Let's see what happened:

Το πρόγραμμα Audacity είναι ένας δωρεάν επεξεργαστής ήχου και εγγραφής, που επιτρέπει τη μίξη και επεξεργασία οποιουδήποτε αριθμού αρχείων ήχου. Το πρόγραμμα είναι γραμμένο σε C++ και χρησιμοποιεί την εργαλειοθήκη wxWidgets GUI για να παρέχει την ίδια γραφική on different operating systems.

The open source Audacity audio software was acquired by Muse Group, which appointed a new management team responsible for developing and of course the new features. A few days after the change, the new administration decided to add some "basic telemetry capabilities" to the software. The announcement was made this week on GitHub by Dmitry Vedenko, who, among other things, Reported that they use Google Analytics to track the following:

  • Start and end the session
  • Errors, such as those of sqlite3, as we need to troubleshoot issues mentioned in the Audacity forum
  • Use effects, sound generators, analysis tools so we can prioritize future improvements.
  • Use file formats for import and export
  • Operating system and Audacity versions

To identify sessions, users receive a UUID that is generated and stored in their. Developers also use Yandex Metrica to correctly estimate daily active users. The reason why a second service was used is not clear, but they report that Google Analytics has very limited ratios. Of course, the name of the developer who announced the changes is Russian (Dmitry Vedenko), and perhaps this is also a reason for choosing Russian Yandex.

Both services, however, record the IP from which the request originates.

According to the new management team, telemetry data collection is optional and configurable. The open source community, however, has not been thrilled with the news.

So if the new development team doesn't respect Audacity friends who have been using it for so many years they will probably lose users as the market has a bunch of .

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Written by giorgos

George still wonders what he's doing here ...

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