Audacity is an extremely popular open source audio editor, with hundreds of millions of downloads on the books. But due to some controversy over changes the Muse Group wanted to implement when they took ownership of the project back in 2021, the userbase has fractured somewhat. Some users simply stick with an older version of the program, while others have switched over to one of the forks that have popped up in the last couple of years.
The Wavacity project by [Adam Hilss] is a bit of both. It looks and feels just like an older version of Audacity (specifically, 3.0.0). But the trick here is that he’s managed to get it working with WebAssembly (WASM) so you can run it in your browser. Impressively, it even works on mobile devices. Though the Audacity UI, which already carries the sort of baggage you’d expect from a program that’s more than 20 years old, is hardly suited to a touch screen.
[Adam] had already ported the wxWidgets and PortAudio libraries over to WASM back in 2022 as part of another project, and was looking for other programs to demonstrate them with. Given the popularity of Audacity, it was a natural choice for webificiation. The final result works remarkably well, to the point you might actually forget it’s running on a tab on your browser.
There’s an understandable debate about moving all of our software into the browser, but if you’re going to do it, the WASM route does seem pretty promising. We previously covered how it was used to bring OpenSCAD to the web with similarly impressive results.
Thanks to [James Newton] for the tip.
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