Audacity 4 is out, and it ships with no AI features at all

Audacity 4 landed on September 3, and it is the biggest change to the free audio editor in its 25 years. The interface has been rebuilt on Qt, clips can finally overlap each other, every built-in effect has been redesigned, and it is still free under GPL v3.

Read the whole launch page and you will not find the word AI once.

What actually changed in Audacity 4

The clip model is the headline. Audacity 3 restricted how you could paste and move clips. Audacity 4 lets them overlap, and adds clip grouping, ripple editing and non-destructive editing.

The rest of the list:

• Trim and stretch handles on every clip, one at the top edge and one at the bottom
• Direct sample editing by zooming in and dragging, with no switch to Draw or Multi-tool
• A split tool that can cut multiple clips at once
• Per-track meters that double as input monitors while recording
• Markers and regions on the timeline, with export driven by your labels
• A loop range with its own row in the ruler and a single on/off toggle
• Export of a selected section, so a loop no longer means exporting the full project
• Real-time effects across a wider set of VST3, Audio Unit and LV2 plugins, with LV2 loading without a wrapper

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Most of the important changes made in this version are under-the-hood foundations, which will allow us to move much faster than ever before. And as always, Audacity remains free and open source. Forever.

Your old work survives. Audacity says every .aup3 project from Audacity 3 opens natively in Audacity 4.

Where Audacity’s AI tools actually live

Audacity does have AI. It is not in the app you download.

The stem separation, the text-to-music generation and the Whisper-based transcription all arrive through the OpenVINO AI plugin pack, installed separately through Muse Hub. Those models run locally on your machine, so nothing gets uploaded anywhere.

If you came to Audacity for free stem splitting, install the plugin pack yourself after you update. Audacity 4 on its own gets you a much better editor and no AI at all.

What Workspaces change for a music workflow

Workspaces are saved tool and interface layouts you can flip between. Audacity ships Classic, Music and Modern presets, plus custom slots, and you can set an accent colour per workspace.

For anyone who has used Audacity for two unrelated jobs, this is the fix for the obvious problem. Podcast editing and music editing want different tools on screen. Until now you rearranged the window every time, or you gave up and left it on one layout.

What Audacity 4 costs and what it runs on

Nothing, and everything. Audacity 4 is free, open source under GPL v3, and runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux from the Audacity site.

A free multitrack editor with real-time VST3 support, local AI stem separation one plugin install away, and no subscription is a genuinely strong starting point for anyone who has not committed to a paid DAW yet.