Audacity 4.0 Rebuilds Its UI on Qt With a Clip-Centric Editing Model

The long-running open-source audio editor ships its biggest overhaul in years, moving the entire interface to the Qt framework with native high-DPI rendering, dockable panels, saveable workspace layouts, and light/dark/high-contrast themes. The centerpiece is a reworked editing model built around clips: users can now select clips directly, group them, edit several at once, and drop them freely between mono and stereo tracks, with overlapping clips replacing rather than blocking each other.

The redesign consolidates Audacity 3’s separate Select, Envelope, Draw, and Multi-tool modes into context-sensitive behaviors, and replaces Sync-Lock with explicit gap-preserving versus ripple variants of cut, delete, and paste. Playback and recording gain a persistent draggable playhead, seek-without-stopping, and timeline-anywhere recording, while official Windows builds now include ASIO support. Projects adopt a new .aup4 format that imports and converts older .aup3 files one-way—converted projects cannot be saved back.

The release is explicitly a work in progress: Time Tracks, MIDI/note tracks, the Mixer, macro scripting, Play-at-speed, and VAMP/LADSPA plugin hosting are all absent for now, alongside some missing exporters, analyzers, and effects the team plans to restore in later versions. A post-release source update re-bundled the SoundTouch and sbsms libraries. And, as the project quipped, they also had the audacity to change the logo.