Ultimate Guitar owner Muse Group acquires Audacity, pledging to keep it free and open-source

There’s been a whole lot of moving and shaking going on in the audio industry just recently - Native Instruments’ alliance with iZotope and Focusrite’s purchase of Dave Smith’s Sequential synth brand to name just a couple of major developments - and now it’s been confirmed that the newly-founded Muse Group, which also owns Ultimate Guitar, has acquired Audacity, the popular free and open-source audio editor.

Muse Group, which was established in April, is designed to “build on the success” of both Ultimate Guitar and MuseScore, the popular notation software. It also includes MuseClass and ToneBridge.

Audacity will now be managed by Martin Keary (aka Tantacrul), who also heads-up MuseScore. He’s posted a video explaining the new ownership structure (see above) and says: “Audacity has just joined Muse Group, a collection of brands that includes another popular open-source music app called MuseScore, which I’m currently in charge of.

“And since things are going rather well at MuseScore, I was asked to step up and also manage Audacity in partnership with its open-source community.

“And just like we’re doing at MuseScore, we’re now planning on significantly improving the feature set and ease of use of Audacity - providing dedicated designers and developers to give it the attention it deserves - while keeping it free and open-source.”

Audacity has long been one of the most popular free audio editors on the market - it was released in 2000 - and the news that it will remain so will come as a relief to the huge number of musicians, podcasters and other creatives who rely on it.

The software was recently updated to version 3, which comes with a new file format and several new features.