Official (and legendary) PuTTY and Audacity apps land in the Microsoft Store

By Daniel Rubino
published

Microsoft's new store policies attract more "classic" apps for Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Audacity Store Win
Audacity Store Win (Image credit: Windows Central)

Microsoft Store Windows11 October 2021

Source: Daniel Rubino / Windows Central (Image credit: Source: Daniel Rubino / Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • Official PuTTY and Audacity apps are now in the Microsoft Store.
  • The new listings are part of the revitalization and new policies Microsoft made for Windows 11 (and now Windows 10).
  • The apps join Firefox, Opera, Epic Games, Discord, Zoom, and others.

The new Microsoft Store for Windows 11 (and now Windows 10, too) brought with it newly relaxed policies that let older "classic" apps to be listed without adopting any new Microsoft technology like installers. The effort is to woo developers to place their apps on the store with the hopes that, down the line, they will slowly begin to use more modern tools to give a better consumer experience.

Starting today, two very old school and still wildly popular apps are now available in the Store: Audacity and PuTTY (via @kid_jenius).

The new-old apps join other big titles first announced with Windows 11, including Zoom, Epic Games, Firefox, Opera, Discord, Disney+, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud Express, Canva, and WinZip, in addition to already existing applications like iTunes, iCloud, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.

Audacity is a well-known, free, easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recording tool. Coming out originally in 2000, the open-source app has been downloaded over 200 million times since. The app is quite relevant in 2022 and is likely to be a go-to solution for those who want familiarity with easy-to-use audio editing options (Fun fact: Back in the early 2010s, our podcast was edited by me in Audacity).

The next app is also a legend: PuTTY. PuTTY is another free and open-source project and acts as a terminal emulator, serial console, and network file transfer application. According to Wikipedia, "PuTTY" has no official meaning despite its unique capitalization. Like Audacity, it was developed in the late 1990s and was available to download in 2000 – apparently a great year for free software.

Anyway, both are now available, and we can't wait to see what other age-old goodies show up.

For more on the story behind Microsoft's new store for Windows 11, including design goals and features, check out my interview with Giorgio Sardo, the General Manager of the new Microsoft Store.

Putty Logo
PuTTY


PuTTY is a communications tool for running interactive command-line sessions on other computers, usually via the SSH protocol. It can also communicate over a serial port, or speak various legacy Internet protocols such as Telnet.

Audacity Logo
Audacity


Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recording tool. It is free, open-source software that has been developed by a dedicated community since 1999.

Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and for some reason, watches. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.

14 Comments
  • Time to upgrade my Audacity with the store version. Nice.
  • It's the same as the one from the website, it's not a packaged app.
  • So may as well get it from the website.
  • Do not use audacity, they added unnecessary telemetry towards it. https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/05/audacity/
    I recommend forks of it such as: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity instead.
  • Noted, although Ghacks has a very different take on the matter remarking it is "opt-in and disabled by default."
  • To be honest I'm always happy to share data about usage, I hope that this will really improve app in future. Hard to imagine what I would have to do to be afraid about sharing any data about usage ;D BTW please use Audacity to edit audio in podcast if you don't want to move bit away from microphones or cover them with something. There are breathing noises, loud inhales etc. I've sent you emails, DMs, replied in tweets but you always ignored :/
  • By all accounts, it is opt in now. For free it is still a great bit of software. I use sound forge myself, I have had a copy for years, no doubt out of date these days, but still do what I need.
  • We gonna PuTTY like it's 1999!
  • I presume people must still use it, but I do wonder what for these days.
  • Database management. Most of my team uses either Putty or SuperPutty.
  • The Audacity devs don't know how to take screenshots in Windows? Why all the image in the store listing are taken from low resolution phone camera?
  • Yay! Awesome news! Longtime Audacity user myself, so will definitely be downloading the store version. As I'm curious if it also includes the mp3 encoding library fill (lame.dll or lame_enc.dll) aswell. Personally use the .dll included with FL Studio. The only issue I have with the Windows store now is that you also need to install Windows cumulative updates before you can update it. Without updating the store app, you can't update other apps any more. The recent cumulative 21h2 update is causing my PC to just randomly freeze and I have to soft reboot via the reboot button on the PC case. Other than this minor niggle, I hope we see alot more old skool applications come to the Windows store. Especially now, with so much more sophisticated phishing and social engineered network intrusions are taking place. It's easier to replicate a website than replicate the store app that resides offline on a user's PC.
  • Cool! I have used Audacity for years and years now. Great to see it in the Store.
  • I don't often need to edit audio, but when I do, Audacity has been my tool of choice for as long as I can remember. Very cool to see it in the store!