Ultimate Guitar founders take over audio software Audacity

Audio editing software Audacity has been acquired by Muse Group, the company behind Ultimate Guitar. Much is still unclear about the acquisition, including what the company paid for Audacity and what it plans to do with the software.

Muse Group started out as Ultimate Guitar, a company that publishes guitartabs. In 2017, this company acquired MuseScore. Since last week, however, the Ultimate Guitar company has gone through life as the Muse Group. The Audacity acquisition is on the website, but neither Muse Group nor Audacity have issued a press release or even written a blog post. It is therefore unknown what Muse Group pays for the popular audio editing program.

MuseScore’s chief designer, Martin Keary, has released a video in which he talks about the acquisition. In it, he gives a few hints about what the company plans to do with the app. Muse Group wants to start hiring multiple senior developers, as well as having conversations with users about what they expect from the app.

Keary also gives several concrete plans. Audacity gets several new UX tweaks, and nondestructive stackable effects. In the future, the makers also want to offer more options for building three-dimensional representations of audio. The developers say that there will be more public development in the future, but what that means in practice is not clear. Audacity is already open source available.