On September 3, 2026 the Audacity team released version 4.0, rebuilding the veteran open-source audio editor on Qt6 with a new clip-editing model, spectral editing, and a redesigned interface. It stays free and open source — but several 3.x features are not in it yet.
2026-09-03 · by Moe Ameen
The Audacity team, part of Muse Group, released Audacity 4.0 on September 3, 2026 — the largest change to the veteran audio editor in decades. The headline is a full interface rebuild: Audacity moved off the aging wxWidgets toolkit and onto Qt6, which brings native high-DPI rendering and a modern, reworked UI. Toolbars and panels can now be moved, docked, floated, shown, or hidden, and the release ships customizable workspace layouts, a new project dashboard/home screen, theme options, and colored clips. It remains free and open source.
The editing model changed too. Clips can now be selected directly by clicking their headers, edited several at a time, and grouped so they move together; clips slide more freely between tracks with automatic overlap handling, and splitting gets its own dedicated tool. Audacity 4.0 adds spectral editing — you can select a frequency region in the spectrogram and apply effects to just that band — plus a redesigned envelope tool for reshaping gain curves, label tracks with chapter points, and playback that can seek to a new position without stopping. On plugins, it supports Nyquist and VST3 across platforms, Audio Units on macOS, and LV2 on Linux, and it adds ASIO support on Windows.
Projects now save in a new .aup4 format, and Audacity 4.0 is backward compatible with older .aup3 projects — they convert automatically on open without altering the originals. That means existing clips, tracks, and labels carry across when you upgrade.
There is an important caveat: this is a from-scratch rebuild, and several features from Audacity 3.x are not in 4.0 at launch. Based on the team's own notes and early coverage, that list includes MIDI support, macros/batch processing, and some effects and analyzers, among other gaps. The developers have said they are working to restore missing capabilities in future updates. If you depend on a specific 3.x feature, verify it is present in 4.0 before switching, and keep your 3.x install until you have confirmed your workflow survives.
Audacity 4.0 makes the first mile better: record the voiceover, cut the episode, kill the hum with spectral editing, export a clean WAV or MP3. What it deliberately does not do — and never has — is turn that finished audio into a week of content across platforms. That handoff is where [Kompozy](/) picks up.
The practical workflow: export your polished audio from Audacity, then feed it to Kompozy as a source. From one recording it generates a run of net-new pieces held to a single [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief) so they read as one creator — [clipped shorts](/glossary/clipped-short) cut from the long-form audio, [Persona Shorts](/glossary/persona-shorts) with a talking-head avatar and burned-in captions, quote graphics pulled from the best lines, a blog article, and an email newsletter. [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) then schedules and publishes the set across the eight social platforms plus blog and email behind a per-post review. It is worth noting the one gap Audacity 4.0 shipped with — macros and batch processing are not back yet — so the "do it once, get many finished outputs" step Kompozy runs is exactly the kind of repetitive production Audacity can no longer automate for you today. Clean the audio in Audacity; let Kompozy [repurpose](/glossary/content-repurposing) and ship it.
Audacity 4.0 was released on September 3, 2026 by the Audacity team (part of Muse Group). It is the biggest overhaul of the editor in decades, rebuilt on the Qt6 toolkit, and remains free and open source.
A full Qt6 interface rebuild with dockable/floatable panels and customizable workspaces, a new clip-editing model (direct clip selection, grouping, freer moves, a dedicated split tool), spectral editing in the spectrogram, a redesigned envelope tool, label tracks with chapter points, seek-during-playback, VST3/Nyquist/AU/LV2 plugin support, ASIO on Windows, and a new .aup4 project format.
Yes. Audacity 4.0 is backward compatible with the older .aup3 format — projects convert automatically when you open them, without modifying the originals, so your clips, tracks, and labels carry across.
Yes. Because 4.0 is a from-scratch rebuild, several 3.x features are not in it at launch, including MIDI support, macros/batch processing, and some effects and analyzers. The developers say they are restoring missing features in future updates, so keep your 3.x install if your workflow depends on one.