Audacity is introducing Telemetry, but in a good way

Future versions of the open source cross-platform audio editor will make use of Telemetry to improve development of the application.

Imagine the following scenario: the ownership of a popular program changes and one of the first new things that will get added is Telemetry. Most users would probably assume the worst, that Telemetry is added for marketing purposes or worse.

In the case of Audacity, that is not the case. There are two main ways that developers introduce Telemetry into an application: the first makes it opt-out, so that all users of the application who upgrade to the new version or install it will have data collected and transferred to the developer. The second way makes the data collecting opt-in, which means that users will have to enable Telemetry willingly before data is collected and transferred.

Audacity's collecting of Telemetry will make use of the second option. In other words: nothing gets collected and submitted by default.

But why Telemetry in the first place? The developers explain that they need some data to make informed decisions. In one of the provided examples, the developers state that Telemetry would help them make educated decisions in regards to removing support for old versions to upgrade important components that these older versions don't support anymore. In another, the developers use the data to determine the extend of a critical issue that has been reported to them. Should development focus on an emergency fix because the issue could potentially affected a lot of users, or is affecting few users only?

As far as Telemetry is concerned, it will be opt-in and disabled by default, only included in the official GitHub releases and not when developers compile Audacity from source.

Audacity plans to use two providers, Google and Yandex initially. Google with Google Analytics to collect the following information:

• Session start and end
• Errors, including errors from the sqlite3 engine, as we need to debug corruption issues reported on the Audacity forum
• Usage of effects, sound generators, analysis tools, so we can prioritize future improvements.
• Usage of file formats for import and export
• OS and Audacity versions

Yandex with Yandex Metrica to "correctly estimate the daily active users correctly". The developers revealed that they are open when it comes to changing solutions if the same level of information is provided.

Now You: do you allow Telemetry in any of your programs or apps?

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