Free Audio Editing App Audacity Gets a Makeover With a Huge Feature-Rich Update

Audacity has been the world's most popular free audio-editing tool for over 20 years, and it just received a major update that could make it even more essential. 

Parent company Muse just announced Audacity Version 3.2, which now supports a full range of modern features. There's enhanced VST3 support, giving a visual boost to editing plugins and increasing the number of supported plugins, as well as a complete visual redesign of the user interface. This is especially good since Audacity launched in 2000, and, well, you could tell.

Version 3.2 also supports non-destructive editing, which is new for the platform. This means that you make temporary edits while retaining the original if those edits don’t work out. The update also lets users add live real-time effects during both recording and mixing.

As for sharing audio snippets or full projects, the update brings one-click sharing via the company’s sister service, Audio.com. You just share the link to the data, and the site does the rest. Files can be shared privately and publicly, with everything residing on a cloud server.

These advancements may seem mundane to users of more advanced software suites, such as Logic Pro X and Ableton Live, but Audacity is free, with no strings attached. To that end, parent company Muse has vowed to never sell any data collected by Audacity users. The update is now available as a free download.