After nearly a decade of incremental patches on the same wxWidgets foundation, Audacity 4.0 landed on September 3, 2026 as the most consequential release in the project's history. The free, open-source audio editor — a staple of podcasters, musicians, and audio engineers since 2000 — has been rebuilt from the ground up around the Qt6 toolkit, bringing a modern interface, a new clip-editing paradigm, and native HiDPI rendering to all platforms.
Why Qt6 Matters
The old wxWidgets UI was showing its age: toolbar layouts felt stiff, high-DPI displays made everything blurry, and dark mode support was a patchwork. Qt6 resolves all three. Toolbars and panels can now be moved, docked, floated, hidden, or rearranged freely. Three default layouts — Modern, Classic, and Music — ship out of the box, each with light, dark, and high-contrast variants plus configurable accent and track colors. If you're on a 4K display, Audacity 4.0 finally looks like a 2026 application.
The New Clip Editing Model
The headline feature is a fundamentally rethought approach to clips. In Audacity 4.0, clicking a clip's header selects it; Shift-clicking selects multiple. Move, trim, or time-stretch several clips together in a single drag. A new dedicated Split tool — long requested by the community — divides recordings at the playhead across one or multiple tracks in a single click. Clip envelopes let you draw volume automation curves directly into clips, creating fades and level adjustments non-destructively without touching the underlying recording.
Workspaces, New Format, and ASIO
Audacity 4.0 introduces Workspaces, letting you save and switch between different panel arrangements for different workflows — mastering vs. podcast cleanup, say. Projects now use the new AUP4 format, which stores clip appearance data and preview thumbnails alongside audio. On Windows, official builds finally ship with ASIO support, eliminating a long-standing barrier for low-latency recording with professional interfaces.
What's Missing (For Now)
The release is honest about its gaps. Several features from Audacity 3 didn't make the cut for 4.0: MIDI and Note tracks, the Mixer board, the Macro Manager and scripting pipe, VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting, Play-at-speed, and Time Tracks are all absent. The team has acknowledged this and lists these as priorities for follow-up releases. For power users who rely on MIDI editing or scripting, staying on 3.x for now is the pragmatic call.
The Bigger Picture
Audacity had a rough stretch between 2021 and 2023, when the acquisition by Muse Group and a controversial telemetry proposal sparked community backlash and a wave of forks. Version 4.0 reads like a reset — a clear statement of intent about the project's future. Coverage on Phoronix and Linuxiac has been broadly positive, with most reviewers agreeing the Qt6 move was the right call even if the missing features sting a little.
Audacity 4.0 is available now on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Download it from the official Audacity changelog page or directly from the GitHub releases page.