Several months in the making, Tenacity 1.4 alpha 1 has finally been released! In this release come not only many new changes, but also quite a few missing things because we recently completed a rebase and, well, this is an alpha release.

Before we get any further, we want to address the biggest feature missing from this version: our themes. This is intentional because our theme system is pending a rewrite. We've had the rewrite planned for years (dating back to before Saucedacity and Tenacity merged) and we are about ready to replace the current theme system pending a few rebases and revivals. By the next alpha, we will have a new theme system in place. Please do not report any issues about missing themes. We already know and are already working on it. Good things come to those that wait :)

The primary highlight of this pre-release is Tenacity being rebased on Audacity 3.7.5. This was done to bring the latest features and changes from Audacity, including realtime effects, beats and bars support, native support for Opus and WavPack, a new toolbar layout and new toolbars, and plenty others, into Tenacity. Of course, all networking bits, including telemetry, update checking, error report sending, and audio.com features, were removed. Aside from the rebase, we also have a new Windows on ARM build. Note that the new Windows on ARM build may not work, but we are accepting issue reports on it as we plan to ship a Windows on ARM build for the final release.

The other highlight of this release is the fact that our CI has been restored, which means two things: nightly builds are back and there is a new Windows on ARM build! To make things getting nightly builds easier, we have a new nightly builds link: https://tenacityaudio.org/nightly. At the moment, there are only Windows and Linux nightly builds, but we will begin working on macOS nightly builds pending a theme system rewrite (macOS builds currently fail due to theme system related issues).

Meanwhile, the Windows on ARM build has a few notes:

• Only Windows 11 or later is supported.
• FFmepg builds will not be provided in this release but in the next release.
• This build is untested. We hope that interested people will report any issues to us.

Since this is a pre-release, we will not be providing any FFmpeg builds nor any GPG signatures. This is intentional. Only stable releases get those things, and this will go the same way with the later beta releases now that we have a stable release out. The only exception for this release, however, is that the final release will not have FFmpeg builds for Windows on ARM. That will be saved for the next release, 1.5.

IMPORTANT: READ BEFORE RUNNING!

This alpha version of Tenacity is still in development and may contain (un)known bugs. You are advised not to use this version with any critical data.

As with any alpha release, back up your settings. This version may not have the appropriate settings migration added yet and can mess up your configuration.

Known Issues

• Themes have not been implemented yet. We are going to complete a theme system rewrite first before we port them over.
  • Due to an issue with the current theme system, macOS builds are broken. Work fixing them is pending the rewrite finishing.
• Tenacity might refer to itself as "Audacity" in some places.
• Preference migration is incomplete. Please backup your settings in the meantime.
• VST3 support is currently disabled as we find a way to use the VST3 SDK with our build system.
• Tenacity cannot be built as GPL v3 or later yet. We will enable this soon.
• Tenacity's app icon might show a generic Wayland icon under Linux if on Wayland.
• Despite the VU meter toolbars having sliders, those currently do not work.

Changelog from 1.3.4

Note: Subsequent changelogs for newer alpha releases will compare themselves
against the latest stable version of Tenacity. You can think of these
changelogs as a public draft :)

New

From Audacity

• Full realtime effects support
• Beats and bars support, including musical recognition
• Improved track panel performance
• Native support for Opus and WavPack files
• A slightly changed track panel layout
• New Audacity themes
• New audio setup layout
• ...and plenty more!

From Us

• Thanks to our newly restored CI, we now provide nightly builds again for easy testing of fixes and other pre-release builds.
• A new Windows on ARM installer is provided.
  • Windows on ARM requires at least Windows 11 or later.
    • FFmpeg is not available for Windows on ARM yet, but we look forward to providing them once we get our own FFmpeg distribution setup.
• When packaging Tenacity yourself, SHA256 sums are now generated automatically. Consequently, hashes are also now produced for nightly builds.
• Windows installer improvements (#625). Thanks @bovirus!
  • The language dialog is now shown
  • Improved reset preferences string for Italian
• New build options for enabling AVX-equipped builds (note: preference is in the order as listed, and none are enabled by default)
  • -DAVX512 - Enables AVX512
  • -DAVX2 - Enables AVX2
  • -DAVX - Enables AVX
• Translation updates from Weblate (thanks to all the translators from Weblate!).

Fixes

• Fixed a crash in spectrogram rendering (#600). Thanks @hails!

Changes

From Audacity

• On Linux, Tenacity configuration directories have changed to better comply with XDG standards.
• The default toolbar layout has changed:
  • The device selection toolbar is now hidden by default.
  • A new audio setup toolbar has been introduced.
  • A new beats and bars toolbar has been introduced
  • The snapping toolbar has been reworked to provide real snapping like you would see in a DAW.

From Us

• wxWidgets 3.3+ is now supported, while increasing the minimum required version to 3.1.5 or later.
• Nyquist support can now be disabled at build time.
• All packaging is done via CPack now and also produces additional .sha256 files for easier verification of built packages.

Removals

• Removed the build date to improve reproducibility of builds.

Checksums

The only way to verify these binaries is to check against the SHA-256 hashes of the files below:

96a830f0ecb9c0e6d868f32d66a2f487e0702fdae745bf81986c4c67b5b1f074  tenacity-win-1.4.0-x86.exe
a50636685023a7a42d6ed1d231e5453ec78d2d9576ae9716361ad7184003ffc2  tenacity-win-1.4.0-x86_64.exe
249040e707d2b1252e0f949b4017e7be0eed66aa1d4a1e341876efc86a742ea4  tenacity-win-1.4.0-arm.exe
d04a6519b20524b4792365a1f4159bf784534cf358515cc562c619cc077a881d  tenacity-linux-1.4.0-x86_64.AppImage

The Way Forward

This is the first planned alpha release for 1.4. There will be a second alpha release that will restore all of Tenacity's own themes again with a brand new theme system.

After the second alpha release, there may be a third and even fourth alpha release, but don't count on those. If anything, it might be more likely that there is a third alpha release more than a fourth, and that will contain the restored ability to build Tenacity against FFmpeg linked rather than having it solely loaded at runtime.

We expect there to be feedback and even push back from the new changes in this release. We expect there to be issues raised, perhaps about reverting some of upstream's latest changes for 1.4. If you want to voice your opinion, remember to create a new issue or comment on an existing one here: https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues

In restoring our CI, we learned that quite a few things needed to be fixed. Some things still need to be fixed, such as compiler caching under MSVC. Going forward, we will try to be more careful in CI breakages this time, as we value having nightly builds since they make testing a lot easier for us and you don't have to rely on self-produced binaries.