Tenacity is a free and open-source audio editor for Windows, macOS, Linux, *BSD, and Haiku. With it, you can perform many tasks, from recording your old CD collection to mastering a podcast episode using a myriad of different effects to using it as a research aid when analyzing or crafting specific audio.
Tenacity is more than just an audio editor, although we’re well known for it. We also maintain forks of several libraries, including the well-used libmad and libid3tag libraries. You need not know what these libraries are or what they do, except that Tenacity uses them itself unsurprisingly. The reason why we mention them, however, is because several packagers, including those for well- known Linux distributions such as Fedora and, more recently, Debian, package our forks of these libraries. There are plenty of others that package them too, but since there are too many to list here, we will redirect you to this page that details libid3tag’s packaging status and this page that details libmad’s packaging status. Beyond these libraries, some of us have also contributed patches to upstream projects we depend on, such as PortAudio. We prefer to use upstream sources wherever possible, so if there’s something that needs to be done upstream, we may submit a PR to help out.
Tenacity is based on Audacity, and there’s a very specific reason why the project was started. The full details are on our History page, but if you are short on time, the primary reasons were attempts at adding telemetry and a new desktop privacy policy. If you are seeking the full details, we encourage you to read the History page and seek out additional sources so you have an accurate view of what happened. Do not rely on only that page or the official manual as your only source.
In most ways, Tenacity can serve as a drop-in replacement with Audacity. However, you must know that Tenacity development was on hiatus for a period of time, and during that time Audacity made several developments that Tenacity does not (yet) have. As new versions of Tenacity are released, we aim to mostly preserve compatibility with newer Audacity versions.
The official manual & documentation can be found here, and features several guides on Tenacity and its features. This site aims to adapt some of the basic guides and connect them to various usecases.