Audacity is a popular open source software application for multi-track audio recording and editing. We are thrilled to announce that the Audacity snap package now includes a set of AI plugins for music separation, noise suppression, music generation, transcription, and super resolution, all powered by Intel’s OpenVINOTM library for AI. The plugins are available out-of-the-box when Audacity is installed from the Snap Store, and runs on Intel® CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs (Neural Processing Unit).
The Audacity snap can be installed from Ubuntu’s App Center or with the following command line:
sudo snap install audacity
For users running on IntelⓇ CoreTM Ultra processors (which are present in many new laptops and desktops), NPU support can be enabled by installing the intel-npu-driver snap and ensuring your user is in the render Unix group:
sudo snap install intel-npu-driver
sudo usermod -a -G render $USER
# now log out and log back in
Note that models are not bundled directly in the snap. To use an AI feature, the corresponding model(s) must first be downloaded and installed. Future releases of the plugins will feature a model manager UI in Audacity itself for this task. For now, the snap bundles an interactive command-line tool for model downloading and installation. Detailed instructions can be found in the Audacity snap’s GitHub repository.
Learn More
To learn more about how to use the OpenVINOTM AI plugins within Audacity, see the READMEs from the upstream project and the Audacity snap.
For issues related to packaging or installation, please raise issues in the appropriate snap packaging GitHub repository.
For bugs or issues related to Audacity, Audacity plugins, or related libraries, please use the appropriate GitHub repository instead.
| Package | Link in the Snap Store | Snap packaging GitHub repository | Upstream project GitHub repository |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audacity | audacity | snapcrafters/audacity | audacity/audacity |
| Audacity plugins | n/a | snapcrafters/audacity | intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity |
| OpenVINOTM runtime | openvino-toolkit-2404 | canonical/openvino-toolkit-snap | openvinotoolkit/openvino |
| Intel® NPU Driver | intel-npu-driver | canonical/intel-npu-driver-snap | intel/linux-npu-driver |
If you are an application developer interested in running AI inference tasks on the Intel® NPU, please consult documentation from Intel’s OpenVINO AI/ML framework.
If you are interested in building your own snaps using the packages shown above, please refer to the snap packaging GitHub READMEs for the NPU (link to README) and OpenVINOTM (link to README) snaps for guidance.
Please also check out other work we’ve done related to IntelⓇ OpenVINOTM AI Plugins and Intel® NPUs: