Motivation and History of Tenacity

This section covers some history of Tenacity, including its origins, start, and various merges, past and present, that still continue with it at this current time in writing.

Definition of “tenacious”

Our name says a lot if we take a look at the definition of “tenacious”:

1. a: not easily pulled apart

   a tenacious metal

   b: tending to adhere or cling especially to another substance

   tenacious burs

2. a: persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desired

   a tenacious advocate of civil rights

   tenacious negotiators

   b: retentive

   a tenacious memory

“Tenacious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenacious. Accessed 4 Dec. 2022.

Keep this definition in mind as you read the background of Tenacity.

History

In April 2021, Muse Group acquired the famous audio editing applicaiton Audacity. Their goals for Audacity were to bring much needed improvements to Audacity. However, not too long after, there was an attempt to add telemetry to the program, spurring controversy among its community. Luckily, the new developers backed off on their proposal, only maintaining basic error reporting and update checking where no personal information is collected.

However, in July of 2021, Audacity was embroiled in controversy once again with a new privacy policy, recommending that users under the age of 13 not use the program. This raised concerns of violating Audacity’s GPL v2 license. While the new privacy policy was updated to address these concerns, the community already had enough.

After all of the controversies, Tenacity was born. It first started as temporary-audacity on GitHub since it didn’t have a name. In order to decide a new name for the project, the lead maintainer at the time held a vote. Among the new names were “Audacium”, “Sneedacity”, and “Tenacity”. The name Sneedacity would later gain traction among 4chan members, resulting in a large volume of votes for the name Sneedacity.

In response to the large volume of votes by 4chan members, the previous maintainers had an emergency vote, choosing the name Tenacity instead of Sneedacity. This upset some, leading to the creation of a new fork with virtually the same intentions. Unsurpringly, this fork was named Sneedacity.

Initially, there was spamming and trolling in the Tenacity repo. As time passed, this activity died considerably, but so did activity on all other fronts too. There were other problems also, such as the fragmentation of Audacity forks with the same goals and intentions, where not one was a clear alternative to Audacity for those who lost trust in the new developers. There were four primary forks that had seen at least some degree of activity: Audacium, Tenacity, Sneedacity, and Saucedacity although other forks, such as AudMonkey, that received some activity but seemingly ceased all activity for (un)known reasons. Initially, Tenacity received qutie a bit of activity, receiving all kinds of contributions from all kinds of different people. Tenacity received a new build system that devendored almost all dependencies, which was made by Be (a Mixxx developer); a new dynamic compressor, originally intended for Audacity, written by Max Maisel (an Audacity contributor), and several other valuable and important contributions. Anyone that conributed put their heart and soul into this, usually without anything in return. Nevertheless, despite the blood, sweat, and tears put into Tenacity by these wonderful contributors, Tenacity development was later put on hiatus due to the lack of activity.

Latern, in July 2022, user FrostKnight on GitHub noticed that Saucedacity was still actively maintained compared to all other forks at the time. This inspired the maintainer to take another look at Tenacity. At the same time, some Tenacity contributors started to look at Saucedacity and get involved. A couple of weeks later, the maintainer of Saucedacity contacted the Tenacity maintainers at the time to merge the two projects together. Months later, the merge was finally completed on November 26, 2022, with the Saucedacity maintainer going on to become the new Tenacity maintainer, also making Tenacity contributors new maintainers as well.

Saucedacity wasn’t the only project Tenacity merged with, however. Audacium also merged with Tenacity, with their maintainer becoming a Tenacity maintainer. Audacium’s themes were merged into Tenacity in addition to carrying over Audacium’s default sample rate.

Indeed, our project history correlates to our name; we are persistent, retaining, and cannot be pulled apart.