Introduction

Welcome to Tenacity, a free and open-source audio editor for Windows, macOS, Linux, *BSD, and Haiku! With it, you can perform many tasks, from recording your old CD collection to mastering a podcast episode using a myriad of different effects to using it as a research aid when analyzing or crafting specific audio.

This manual is written for the Tenacity 1.4 series of releases. If the version of Tenacity you are using does not start with ‘1.4’, you are using the wrong version and need to consult the proper manual for your version of Tenacity.

Tenacity is more than just an audio editor, although we’re well known for it. We also maintain forks of several libraries, including the well-used libmad and libid3tag libraries. You need not know what these libraries are or what they do, except that Tenacity uses them itself unsurprisingly. The reason why we mention them, however, is because several packagers, including those for well- known Linux distributions such as Fedora and, more recently, Debian, package our forks of these libraries. There are plenty of others that package them too, but since there are too many to list here, we will redirect you to this page that details libid3tag’s packaging status and this page that details libmad’s packaging status. Beyond these libraries, some of us have also contributed patches to upstream projects we depend on, such as PortAudio. We prefer to use upstream sources wherever possible, so if there’s something that needs to be done upstream, we may submit a PR to help out.

Tenacity is based on Audacity, and there’s a very specific reason why the project was started. The full details are in the section below, but if you are short on time, the primary reasons were attempts at adding telemetry and a new desktop privacy policy. If you are seeking the full details, we encourage you to read the section below and seek out additional sources so you have an accurate view of what happened. Do not rely on this manual as your only source.

Tenacity can serve as a drop-in replacement for Audacity 3.7.x. There are a few notable differences, however, that you should be aware of, which are explained in the Differences from Audacity section. Some differences are intentional and will remain that way unless user feedback dictates otherwise.

The purpose of this manual is to serve as a comprehensive reference for everything regarding Tenacity. It also attempts to transform your average end user into a more advanced, knowledgeable user. We do not expect you to read the entire manual because it takes time, but such an exercise is welcomed. Regardless, we hope this manual provides sufficient explanation about using Tenacity, what it can do, and how to use it effectively.

Finally, remember that the manual is always a work in progress. For this version and edition, this is no doubt the case as you may see several sparsely- documented pages or even sections with just “TODO” in them. Writing documentation is no easy task. Writing good documentation takes even more time. If you are interested in contributing an improvement to the manual, we welcome your input through issues over at the manual’s issue tracker, https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity-manual/issues.

Motivation and History of Tenacity

Perhaps a very appropriate start to Tenacity is its background and history. Recall that there was a reason why the project was started in the first place.

This section covers some history of Tenacity, including its origins, start, and various merges, past and present, that still continue with it at this current time in writing.

Definition of “Tenacity”

Despite the rather controversial origins of our name, it turns out that it is quite a suitable one if we take a look at the definition of “tenacious”:

1. a: not easily pulled apart a tenacious metal

   b: tending to adhere or cling especially to another substance tenacious burs

2. a: persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desired a tenacious advocate of civil rights

   tenacious negotiators

   b: retentive a tenacious memory

“Tenacious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenacious. Accessed 4 Dec. 2022.

Keep this definition in mind as you read the background of Tenacity.

History

In April 2021, Muse Group acquired the ubiquitus audio editing application Audacity. They intended to bring much needed improvements to Audacity, such as a modern UI, internal refactoring, and plenty of new features. Alas, these plans would come off to a rocky start with their initial proposals.

In May 2021, Audacity was first embroiled in controversy when a pull request was opened to implement telemetry using Google Analytics and Yandex Metrica. This received fierce backlash, and Muse Group quickly received the message that Telemetry was not welcomed in Audacity. At the same time, however, they also implemented a new Contributor License Agreement. While that doesn’t particularly concern regular end-users, many in the open source community were concerned about whether or not Audacity could turn proprietary in any form. At the time of writing, this contributor license agreement is still in place, and neither have we seen any part of Audacity turn proprietary or any possible plans that could involve such a thing. Out of that entire controversy, only error reporting and update checking would be implemented following forward. Only years later would their own system of telemetry, UUID instance tracking, be implemented starting in Audacity 3.7.2. (For more information on Audacity’s UUID instance tracking, see https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/introducing-a-uuid-system-in-audacity-here-s-what-you-need-to-know/128561).

Many can agree that one controversy for a project like Audacity is already enough. Despite that, only months later did the project find itself in yet another controversy, this time regarding a new privacy policy. One particular part was the recommendation of users under age 13 to not use the program, which many saw as a violation of Audacity’s GPL license. Again did Muse Group make some clarifications and address these concerns, but the damage was already done.

After all of the controversies, Tenacity was born. It first started as temporary-audacity on GitHub since it didn’t have a name. In order to decide a new name for the project, the lead maintainer at the time held a vote. Among the new names were “Audacium”, “Sneedacity”, and “Tenacity”. The name Sneedacity would later gain traction among 4chan members, resulting in a large volume of votes for the name Sneedacity.

In response to the large volume of votes by 4chan members, the previous maintainers had an emergency vote, choosing the name Tenacity instead of Sneedacity. This upset some, enough to the point of creating its own controversy. Alongside with Tenacity, however, was another fork aptly named Sneedacity. Whether or not it was created directly in response to the naming controversy is unclear, and while it is always possible, it appears Sneedacity was simply created in response to its name being available as one of the other options.

At this point, the entire news around Audacity was very nasty. Not only did users’ trust of Audacity get destroyed by its new owners, but the chaotic events surrounding Tenacity’s start (spamming and trolling, to name a few) did not help the situation either. To add to the chaos even further, there were several other forks that had the same goals in mind. Aside from Tenacity and Sneedacity, there was also Audacium, another fork similar to both Tenacity and Sneedacity in that it also removed networking features from Audacity. There were also Audmonkey and Saucedacity, two forks that received activity but didn’t get much attention. Despite this situation, Tenacity received some substantial contributions, including a new build system, written by Be (a former Mixxx contributor); a new dynamic compressor, written by Max Maisel (an Audacity contributor); new themes and cursors, made by akleja; and plenty of other changes that haven’t been mentioned here. Alas, the situation was already set in stone, and despite the wonderful contributions and hard work done by Tenacity’s various contributors, the project was put on hiatus due to a lack of activity and maintainer burnout.

By 2022, it was clear that few forks were still under active maintenance, and that the entire Audacity situation was more or less settled. At this point, the three major forks (Tenacity, Audacium, and Sneedacity) saw either little activity (Audacium and Sneedacity) or were put on hiatus (Tenacity). Audmonkey had already ceased activity much sooner,

Later, in July 2022, user FrostKnight on GitHub noticed that Saucedacity was still actively maintained compared to all other forks at the time. This inspired the maintainer to take another look at Tenacity. At the same time, some Tenacity contributors started to look at Saucedacity and get involved. A couple of weeks later, the maintainer of Saucedacity contacted the Tenacity maintainers at the time to merge the two projects together. Months later, the merge was finally completed on November 26, 2022, with the Saucedacity maintainer going on to become the new Tenacity maintainer, also making Tenacity contributors new maintainers as well.

Saucedacity wasn’t the only project Tenacity merged with, however. Audacium also merged with Tenacity, with their maintainer becoming a Tenacity maintainer. Audacium’s themes were merged into Tenacity in addition to carrying over Audacium’s default sample rate.

Indeed, our project history correlates to our name; we are persistent, retaining, and cannot be pulled apart.