Does anyone know if OcenAudio is Safe?

I just installed OceanAudio to do simple audio editing tasks which Audacity makes very painful, disk-space intensive (1gb plus per hour) and therefore very slow. It is an awesome program which does not need online help and greets me with a "drop your files here" Awesome!

However, along the way, I got a message from gdebi which said that installing debs outside the the standard repo can be a security risk. With Skype and Opera (don't remind me about Opera's latest breach of data), I don't care and trust they will be OK. However, I know nothing of OceanAudio.

I was wondering what people know about it, and what type of security risks I am looking at with OceanAudio or anything else I might install. For Instance, can someone trap my keystrokes and get Internet Passwords?

1 Answer

There are three decent options when installing applications under Ubuntu, in order of safety:

1. In an ideal world you would be safest by only installing applications that have come through the Ubuntu Repositories. These have usually been tested comprehensively and have usually been well packaged.
2. However not all applications are packaged and available in this way. The next safest method is to find the source code of a proven application and compile and package it yourself. However this requires some expertise and a degree of fiddling around that many users are not prepared to undertake.
3. The final safe option is to install a package from outside the Ubuntu system which may come from:
   • A PPA (Personal Package Archive). There are some risks inherent in using just any PPA and you should do some homework first.
   • A deb package from the developer's website. Now gdebi rightly warns of the risks inherent in the installation of deb packages from such websites and you should do some homework first.

The 'homework' in point 3 varies from application to application. In the case of OcenAudio a Google search will show that it is a well established application that has received positive reviews and certainly no reports of captured key strokes or lost passwords.

My own personal review may also help out here as I have installed OcenAudio on a 64bit Xenial system as follows:

wget
sudo dpkg -i ocenaudio_debian64.deb
sudo apt-get -f install

I have tested it comprehensively and it runs well with no security risks that I could see. Nice application too:

So my personal recommendation: do some further research on Ocenaudio, add my own thoughts to your research and then install and enjoy this great application :)

References:

• Lifehacker: Ocenaudio Is a Free, Fast, Streamlined Audio Editor
• Betanews: ocenaudio is an outstanding audio editor