I have been using Audacity for about 20 years as well, or at least 15. I feel seething hatred for it. I use alternatives where possible, even if I have to pay for them.

Audacity has the dubious distinction of being the only software that, to my knowledge, has directly caused me physical pain and harm. You see, unlike every other application on the planet, the volume slider in Audacity does not control Audacity’s playback volume. Instead, it controls the system volume (why?). Normally I keep my system playback volume at a safe level but Audacity has, on a few occasions, sabotaged my efforts and hurt my ears in the process.

Then there’s the weird way in with Audacity is designed. It seems like it can’t decide whether it’s supposed to be a DAW or an audio editor, and it ends up being terrible at both. Audacity treats audio files as “projects”. If you are just doing some simple editing, then you probably don’t want to save your work as an Audacity project, you probably want to open a PCM file and save your work as PCM files. Audacity steps in your way at every moment, asking you what format you want to convert to, asking you to add tags, converting your file to 32-bit float without asking (even though Audacity supports 16-bit and 24-bit tracks), and then after you save your work, it asks you if you want to lose your work (because Audacity doesn’t think you’ve saved your work unless you save the project).

A normal task I might have for audio editing is to open up a file, do some basic processing, cut it up, and save the pieces. Audacity lacks basic commands like “copy as new file” or “paste as new file”.

So Audacity has taken a simple task which I may need to do over and over again for an hour at a time, and it adds extra steps which are completely ridiculous and unnecessary.

Another simple task is recording a clip of audio. For various reasons, I often record at 48kHz. In Audacity, you can’t change the rate before you record, because the track doesn’t exist yet. So you start recording audio, stop, change the rate through a fiddly little drop-down menu two layers deep. If you want to record from the second input, you CAN’T DO THAT AT ALL, you have to record from both inputs and then delete one of the channels afterwards (why??????????)

There are also a ton of other minor problems floating around—Audacity freezes while you hit “preview” in a filter until the sound is done playing. This is a real double whammy, a real one-two punch, if you remember that Audacity may have decided to usurp control of the system playback volume from the user (again, why? other apps don’t do this).

Then there’s all that effort that Audacity makes to try and be a DAW, but it doesn’t work very well, and it mostly gets in the way of whatever real work you want to be doing. It seems to have the user interface of a non-destructive editor but without actually providing non-destructive editing.

As a final note, Audacity is prone to crashing. A lot. I opened the latest version of Audacity when writing this comment, and in that short time, Audacity has crashed. This matches my memories of it from 10-15 years ago, because Audacity crashed back then, too.

God, I really fucking hate Audacity.

I just want to address the audio slider issue. On Windows with the latest version of Audacity (2.4.2), when adjusting the "Playback Volume" slider on the main toolbar (I assume that's the one you're referring to), the track volume changes but the system volume does not. The tooltip for the slider says "emulated" so I assume that means exactly that, it's adjusting the volume without messing with the system mixers.

Perhaps the slider works differently on Linux with its sound subsystem, or maybe this was an issue with older versions of Audacity. Googlign does suggest that the Audio host option on the toolbar, if the "wrong" one is selected, could result in the system volume being directly modified by the slider (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/device_toolbar.html)

Anyways, maybe just look into that. In my experience people prefer to whine and whinge rather than solve their problems. Take that as an insult if you want (not intended), but if it helps resolve this issue for you then I don't mind.

Not helpful—the problem exists on the latest version of Audacity (2.4.2), and there is no option to change the host. Audacity should never be changing the system audio levels anyway, and it is worrying that the Audacity developers ever thought that this was acceptable behavior.

Honestly, Audacity is just such an all-around nightmare that I don’t think fixing one or two problems would make a difference anyway.

Amen. I want to love it and I’ve tried but the file format thing is a dealbreaker. I fantasize about a fork that fixes the “projects” vs wav files issue, and in my fantasy the keybindings match Sound Forge so it’s not jarring to switch back and forth.

Honest question: Then why do you keep using it? It's not like it's the only audio editor out there...

I usually don’t. I use Amadeus Lite, which I paid $25 for and I am quite happy with.

However, sometimes I am stuck doing audio work on Linux or Windows, or on a system which is not my own.