Audacity 4 Brings Overlapping Clips, Workspaces & New UI

Biggest update, still free & familiar   03-Sep-26

Muse Group has announced Audacity 4, the largest update to the free, open-source editor since its launch in 2000, aimed at speeding up day-to-day edits without breaking muscle memory. Existing keyboard shortcuts stay put, Audacity 3 projects open normally, and the familiar tracks-and-timeline view remains.

• Clip editing - Overlap clips, select and edit multiple clips together across tracks, group related clips to move as one, and use fully non-destructive trimming. Ripple editing options control how deletes affect the rest of the project.
• Split tool - A dedicated Split makes quick cuts at the playhead across one or multiple tracks.
• Clip envelopes - Volume automation lives inside each clip for fades and gain moves without destructive processing.
• Effects & plug-ins - Built-in effects get refreshed interfaces; real-time processing remains, with VST3, Audio Unit and LV2 support.
• Home screen & Workspaces - A new project hub shows visual thumbnails for local sessions and cloud projects on audio.com. Save custom interface layouts per task and switch between them quickly.
• UI & navigation - Reorganized toolbars and track controls, updated meters, an always-visible playhead, smoother pan/zoom, plus light/dark themes, customizable accent colours and improved high-contrast mode.

If you cut podcasts or dialogue, ripple options and multi-clip moves tidy timeline surgery. For music work, overlapping clips and non-destructive trim make comping and arrangement less fiddly. If you run a project on more than one machine or share with clients, the audio.com link puts cloud sessions on the home screen, and Workspaces let you flip between music, podcast or restoration layouts without reconfiguring the UI.

Audacity 4 remains free and open source. The full release is available via MuseHub, Muse Group's software marketplace, which also hosts curated plug-ins, effects and sound libraries for use with Audacity.