21 ms·

Audacity 3.0

1065 points by app4soft 6y ago

synergy20 6y ago
Thanks for the great work, Audacity is my to-go audio maker for multiple years. It's like gimp for graphics, vlc for video playing, what a god send.
TomMasz 6y ago
I use a Mac, which has GarageBand installed, and Audacity is still my go-to choice for any audio editing. I just used it to split a stereo track into two mono tracks, something I'm not sure I can do in GarageBand (TBH I didn't look since I had Audacity).
michael-ax 6y ago
* labeled silences! * bugs i've never run into; fixed * the pile of files -> a single .aup3 --> Thanks to all involved!
john4532452 6y ago
If there anything that Audactity can do which blender can not ? I plan to learn video editing using blender and don't want to learn another tool if blender can do everything Audactiy does.
EamonnMR 6y ago
Audacity is a great tool. It's not a DAW and doesn't try to be one; I find myself using it most when I need to do a quick edit on a sound or make a recording and I'll be done before my DAW would even have started up.
- sidpatil 6y ago
  It's like the Microsoft Paint of audio editing.
  - xuhu 6y ago
    More like the GIMP of audio editing.
    - scubbo 6y ago
      I think the point of the original comment was that, no, it's precisely _not_ that. The functionality isn't super deep, broad, nuanced, or customizable - but it is enough to get _most_ jobs done.
      - yellowapple 6y ago
        > The functionality isn't super deep, broad, nuanced, or customizable Having used Audacity quite a bit, my impression is the exact opposite. Indeed, those traits are exactly why Audacity's UI is currently as "clunky" as it is: because there's a veritable smörgåsbord of features that need encapsulated. "Audacity is the GIMP of audio" is perfectly accurate in this regard. But GIMP ain't Inkscape, and Audacity ain't Ardour.
        haberman 6y ago
        > "Audacity is the GIMP of audio" is perfectly accurate in this regard. This statement brings back a fond memory for me. I was first introduced to open-source software in the late 90s, when I was in high school. GIMP was one of the best known and most popular pieces of open-source software at the time. At the time there wasn't really an equivalent open-source equivalent for audio that was nearly as feature rich or popular. I remember coming across some programmers around that time who were trying to write "GIMP for audio" -- they called it GWAMP (Gnu Wave Audio Manipulation Program) -- but it never really took off. Then a few years later, when I was in college, I came across a programmer named Dominic Mazzoni who was working on this pre-1.0 program he called Audacity. It was still in the early stages, and didn't have anyone else working on it except his PhD advisor who had written a lot of the DSP code. Dominic and I hit it off, and I spent a lot of my college free time hacking on it, as other contributors started joining the effort too. And then it went on to succeed beyond my wildest dreams (thanks mostly to Dominic and others -- I was just in the right place at the right time). If you had told me in the 90s that I'd have a chance to get in on the ground floor of a program that, 20 years later, was still being called the "GIMP of audio", it would have sounded too good to be true.
- megablast 6y ago
  I guess everyone should know what a DAW is.
  - btown 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation
vz8 6y ago
I'm happy to hear about the new file format. The prior "piles of files" were a problem when saving to folders watched by Dropbox / OneDrive. Thanks Audacity, for an excellent tool!
maxfurman 6y ago
I'm pretty sure all of the songs I recorded in high school are gone forever, since I only backed up the Audacity files and not the entire folder. Perhaps this is for the best, but either way I'm glad future emo teens will have an easier time preserving their work.
- Igelau 6y ago
  Maximum emo-ness: the darkness in these songs is so irredeemable that even the project file couldn't save them.
- falcolas 6y ago
  My wife did the exact same thing in transferring the files between her computer and mine. This is one thing that could definitely be made a lot better.
  - latexr 6y ago
    I was made better. The most important feature they highlight is the new format which contains everything.
shmerl 6y ago
I wish developers would merge the XDG Base Directory support patches.
saghul 6y ago
Thanks Audacity team and contributors! I love to see major releases from tools I've been using for decades. So dependable, always ready to save my bacon when I need it.
nvr219 6y ago
Audacity is one of the best open source software products out there. Grats on the release!!!!
codetrotter 6y ago
Interesting that they decided to change the project format from bag of files to single file. I certainly remember when I was new to computers and I was using some software and brought only the project file with me to a friend and didn’t know I had to bring the source files also. But after the first time of making that mistake I learned from it. Personally I still like the bag of files approach for music and video projects because it keeps the source files accessible and I use a few different pieces of software and don’t want my source files locked into a project files (even when it’s a SQLite based approach like Audacity 3). And for me personally I don’t want to duplicate files on my local storage medium either. But I can see how it will be helpful to users in general. macOS has a really interesting feature that allows bag of files to appear like a single file to users but it’s actually just a directory and you can still access the files inside by opening it as a directory. Of course that doesn’t help for cross platform software though, as on other platforms you will still only see it as the bag of files that it really is.
- rectang 6y ago
  > macOS has a really interesting feature that allows bag of files to appear like a single file I think this is what you're referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_(macOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_(macOS) I used to have problems with running out of file descriptors on MacOS, and I recall that the maximum number was 256. I was wondering if this package abstraction could be used to work around it. But then I checked `ulimit -a` and it looks like on Big Sur the max is now 2560. Progress!
  - quesera 6y ago
    The wikipedia article does not mention the most common example -- .app "files"/bundles. E.g.: zsh% ls Applications/Firefox.app/Contents CodeResources Library PkgInfo _CodeSignature Info.plist MacOS Resources
  - codetrotter 6y ago
    > I think this is what you're referring to Almost. I was actually referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_(macOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_(macOS) which is the same concept. See also https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Miscellaneous/Reference/UTIRef/Articles/System-DeclaredUniformTypeIdentifiers.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009259-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Mi...
klodolph 6y ago
> We also fixed over 160 bugs that had been accumulating over the years. This is good news indeed. Previous versions of Audacity are so buggy that they're barely usable. Version 2.4.2 crashed more often than not when I used it.
- yesenadam 6y ago
  That doesn't seem fair. I used Audacity a lot for all kinds of things over the years, (most recently 2.3.3 on a Mac) and it never crashed or even behaved weirdly.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Why doesn't it seem fair? I've used Audacity from time to time over the past 15 years or so. I've had so many bad experiences with it that I try to use alternatives whenever reasonable. I've used it on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux on different hardware configurations. It's the only piece of software that has ever physically hurt me, to my knowledge (on some platforms it adjusts system volume without warning). It's been buggy as hell and I've had some profoundly negative experiences using it.
    - yesenadam 6y ago
      Doesn't seem fair because "Previous versions of Audacity are so buggy that they're barely usable." isn't true. Sounds like it was true for you, but not most other people. Otherwise it wouldn't be so popular, would it. I've never noticed a bug using it. Maybe you're doing particular things with it that I never tried to do, like I never used most of the effects.
      - klodolph 6y ago
        I am tired of having people tell me that my criticisms of Audacity are invalid or unfounded. “Audacity is fine, you must be using it wrong,” is what I’m hearing here. I’ve heard it before. Last time I used Audacity, it was version 2.4.2, which is the previous version before 3.0. It adjusted the system volume against my wishes, worked for about five minutes, and crashed. I gave it another shot—tried running it again, but it crashed again fairly quickly. I have no fucking clue what I could possibly be doing wrong. I was not trying to make it crash, I didn’t think I was doing anything unusual. No esoteric formats, no bizarre hardware configurations, no plugins. When you make comments like that, I feel like my concerns are just being dismissed as invalid. The argument that Audacity is popular and therefore it must not be buggy makes no sense to me. People will use buggy software if they still get work done.
rsj_hn 6y ago
I was taking a zoom class and they released some youtube videos in which the vocabulary words were pronounced by a native speaker. I downloaded Audacity, grabbed the youtube video with python's youtube downloader, and was able to splice up the recording into individual vocab words and put them on my Anki cards. So Audacity helped me to learn a foreign language. Thanks!
tony 6y ago
For those interested Audacity's underlying design, it's featured in The Architecture of Open Source Applications: https://www.aosabook.org/en/audacity.html https://www.aosabook.org/en/audacity.html There's a section that references .aup files, see 2.6. BlockFiles (Audacity 3.0.0 introduces the .aup3 file format) The most memorable parts of this to me was wXWidgets. Here's ShuttleGUI: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/master/src/ShuttleGui.cpp https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/master/src/Shuttle...
- app4soft 6y ago
  Also may recommend to read FLOSS Manuals' book on Audacity[0] [0] https://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/_full/ https://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/_full/ [1] https://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/_info/ https://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/_info/ [PDF] https://flossmanuals.net/pub/audacity-en-2018.02.pdf https://flossmanuals.net/pub/audacity-en-2018.02.pdf [EPub] https://flossmanuals.net/pub/audacity-en-2018.02.epub https://flossmanuals.net/pub/audacity-en-2018.02.epub
tomduncalf 6y ago
Audacity is a great project and I’m very glad it exists. Personally I only need pretty basic wave editing and am happy with OcenAudio (https://ocenaudio.com https://ocenaudio.com - free but closed source), it’s the closest thing I’ve found to Cool Edit 2000 (which I still think is the best wave editor ever!) and has quite a nice UI.
- brtkdotse 6y ago
  Cool Edit became Adobe Audition and is still very nice to work with.
  - tomduncalf 6y ago
    I tried it out a while back and it felt really heavyweight for what I needed (often just trim, normalise, export)... so I’m happy with a lightweight, fast wave editor, then I do anything more involved in a DAW. Thanks for the recommendation though!
schlowmo 6y ago
Very pleased that Audacity is still actively developed. I said it before but I think this can't be overstated: Audacity may had some quirks over the years but it's still one of the most (if not the most) accessible tool for audio editing by non-professionals with an adequate feature set. It's used by community radio stations all over the world since it's easy to teach and cross-platform while being free.
- simias 6y ago
  Audacity is a godsend for amateur audio makers, but man the UI is really really clunky. If I was a rich philanthropist I'd throw them some money to gut the core of the software and rebuild a decent user interface around it. But hey, UI is hard and audio processing UIs are probably harder than most.
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    To me it looks like the bigger problem is the lack of decent GTK controls for multimedia/music production. A lot of Linux/FOSS software suffers from that limitation, Audacity being just one of them. To be honest, most Windows based plugins also historically came with their own interface because the stock UI wasn't good/fast/pretty enough for some uses (knobs, waveform display and manipulation, etc) although I believe today it shouldn't be too hard to start the development of a FOSS generic multiplatform widgets kit that doesn't suck for that purpose.
  - rosmax_1337 6y ago
    I completely understand that people find the UI offputting. But the UI is effective. Or maybe I should say the UX is effective? Either way, an effective UI/UX is more than what a lot of "newer and fancier" UIs have going for them. And since the application is meant as a tool for creators, and not a product facing consumers (as a website might be), personally I can completely forgive a "clunky ui", as long as it is logically laid out and with normal workflows.
    - Guest42 6y ago
jan_Inkepa 6y ago
Audacity is a wonderful piece of software - I've used it in a lot of projects for mastering/tweaking sound-effects. And it's come a very long way in terms of stability. Long may it continue to thrive :)
app4soft 6y ago
JFTR, There is already a project[0,1,2] on adding Audacity into Blender: > The Blender & Audacity add-on playing both apps in sync - without Jack - so you can edit sound in Audacity and using Blender as video player [0] https://github.com/tin2tin/audacity_tools_for_blender/ https://github.com/tin2tin/audacity_tools_for_blender/ [1] https://twitter.com/tintwotin/status/1371885605735530500 https://twitter.com/tintwotin/status/1371885605735530500 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61Zvb8AipA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61Zvb8AipA
VectorLock 6y ago
I remember seeing this project launched at CodeCon way way back in the day and I'm happy its been cruising along ever since.
dvirsky 6y ago
Audacity is an awesome project. I know a LOT of non technical people with no affinity to open source who are using it. I think a UI refresh to something modern looking will help it increase its popularity even more, I hope they find someone to help with this.
ShaneMcGowan 6y ago
Love to see audacity still going strong, was one of the first audio tools I used for music production back in the day and is a great piece of software
sedeki 6y ago
Did they fix the macOS issue(s)? You had to run Audacity from the command line for whatever reason from macOS Catalina.
roddylindsay 6y ago
Thank you Audacity for an absolutely indispensable piece of software for anyone who works with audio.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Ugh. FOSSHub. That enormous VPN downloader at the top. It took me some time to remember to avoid it. I do luvs me Audacity, though. Good show!
- app4soft 6y ago
  FOSS Torrents team already provided `.torrent` downloads for Audacity 3.0.0.[0,1] [0] https://twitter.com/FossTorrents/status/1372176177708818433 https://twitter.com/FossTorrents/status/1372176177708818433 [1] https://fosstorrents.com/softwares/audio/audacity/ https://fosstorrents.com/softwares/audio/audacity/
rosmax_1337 6y ago
Fantastic. Audacity keeps it simple and does it well, if there was ever a hall of fame of applications, Audacity deserves a spot. Heck, if I were to distribute any kind of "creative suite", I would always include Audacity, no matter what operating system I was targeting. It is a near essential tool for working with audio, daily, or every now and then. The genius of the application is that it does not try to be more than a waveform editor. Oftentimes, no matter if you are new to audio production or a veteran audio technician, you just need to edit some sound, and Audacity lets you get it done in a easy enough way for newbies, and in a complex enough way for veterans. Maintainers of projects like these should carry themselves with pride. Projects that stand the test of time and continue to deliver exactly what you needed is what makes the IT-world go around.
- zbendefy 6y ago
  yup, vscode, blender, audacity, gimp, inkscape and openshot running on linux can get you very far for basically 0 software cost. Its great to have an array of these tools provided for free
  - FlashBlaze 6y ago
    While I'm not using linux it really is amazing how far FOSS can take you. I haven't used openshot but can definitely vouch for kdenlive[0] [0] https://kdenlive.org/en/ https://kdenlive.org/en/
- ddingus 6y ago
  Entirely seconded. What people really need is there, works, is just not a big deal to get done. Well done.
dang 6y ago
If curious, past threads: Audacity 2.2.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15621681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15621681 - Nov 2017 (146 comments) The Future of Audacity, Interview with the Team - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392035 - April 2015 (28 comments) Removing background noise in Audacity by differencing stereo channels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6158058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6158058 - Aug 2013 (13 comments) Audacity 2.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3714766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3714766 - March 2012 (63 comments) Learning a new language with Audacity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2962284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2962284 - Sept 2011 (9 comments)
Humphrey 6y ago
While I use Logic for making "real" audio, Audacity is great for those other audio tasks. For example, I used Audacity's "Import Raw Data" feature to open a dd image of a USB drive to recover corrupted audio FTW!
- lukevp 6y ago
  Interesting, I guess this only works to recover uncompressed wav files where you know the sample frequency and bit depth? Or does it read the wav headers when it finds them or something?
  - Humphrey 6y ago
    Yes you are correct! My 12 channel mixer (Behringer X12) allows you to plug in a USB disk and record the output. But somebody turned off the mixer while it was recording, which meant that lots of bits of data were written, but the WAV file header was never updated with the size of the file. So I did another recording to determine the frequency & bit depth, and then opened the dd disk image with those settings. It was pretty obvious from the waveform image which parts of the drive had the recording, and it was perfect. Interestingly, I got those settings completely wrong at the start, and I could still tell it was music by listening to it, it was just very corrupted sounding!
marcodiego 6y ago
Audacity is an example that being good enough is enough. It probably doesn't competes against industry giants, but considering its simplicity and license, it is probably the most used audio editor in use today. Congrats audaciteam! Disclaimer: I was a contributor a long time ago to the noise filter effect.
corytheboyd 6y ago
If ever we needed to archive timeless bits is software to rebuild society with, Audacity would definitely be on that list.
nickjj 6y ago
I have to commend Audacity for making a tool so easy to use that regular (but technical) folks can use it with no prior recording experience. It being cross platform and runnable on so many devices due to low hardware requirements is a big perk too. I've recorded 70+ episodes of the Running in Production podcast[0] and to get the highest quality audio I can for the show I ask guests to locally record their side of the conversation with Audacity while I do the same on my end. Then we talk in real-time over Zoom to have the actual conversation. Out of 70+ episodes there hasn't been a single case where something went wrong due to Audacity. These are shows where we're continuously recording for 60-90 minutes too. All I ended up doing was write up a quick guide. Basically how to download it, making sure your "good" mic is selected and doing a test recording. No one has ever complained that the process was too involved or hard to follow. Most folks get set up in less than 2 minutes with no assistance and most guests have never recorded audio before. [0]: https://runninginproduction.com/ https://runninginproduction.com/
- FlashBlaze 6y ago
  Love your podcast!
  - nickjj 6y ago
    Hey, thanks a lot for listening to it.
- btown 6y ago
  Would you be able to share a copy of the guide?
  - nickjj 6y ago
    Sure, it's all text based that I send in an email. The Audacity specific part of the guide is: --- 3. Locally recording our own individual audio tracks Programs like Zoom and Google Hangouts are great for talking in real-time but their audio quality is extremely low for a podcast. So we'll be recording our own individual audio tracks. Basically that means you'll want to download a tool so that you can press record on your own computer, record your side of things and then be in a position to send me the exported result of that. Then I'll combine our tracks together in the end. Don't worry, we'll do an audio test and double check things together on the call to make sure things are set up properly before we hit record. If you're not already familiar with tools to locally record your own audio track you can try using https://www.audacityteam.org/ https://www.audacityteam.org/. It's free, open source and works on all major platforms. It's a fantastic tool. After starting Audacity there will be a drop down box near the top of the toolbar where you can select your microphone. If you have multiple microphones please make sure your best microphone is selected. macOS and Linux users can use the defaults for everything else. If you're on Windows there is a drop down box that says MME to the left of where you pick your microphone. You should change that to Windows WASAPI to ensure you get good quality audio. Next up you can try recording yourself a few times to get the hang of the program. You can do that by pressing the big red button. After doing so when you speak into your microphone you should see a bunch of blue bars and lines scroll across your screen. That's good! It means your microphone is picking up your voice. You can confirm if things recorded properly by pressing stop and then playing back your recording. You should hear yourself loud and clear. If you can't then make sure your headphones or speakers are selected in the drop down box to the right of your mic. If you want to send me a sample that would be fine, but you don't have to. After we finish our call, it will be very important to stop the recording, save the project and then export it to both wav and mp3 files (just to be safe). You can do that by going to the File menu and then picking Save Project -> Save Project. You can save it anywhere you want. That will ensure your recording gets saved in case something catastrophic happens while exporting the files, such as the power going out or Audacity crashing for whatever reason. Lastly, you'll want to do a File -> Export and then choose wav. Once that finishes you'll want to do the same thing for mp3. The default settings are fine. Keep in mind the recording will be roughly 60 minutes long when we do it for real which will take up about 400-500 MB of disk space, so make sure you have at least 1 GB of space to be safe before recording.
TestPersonTwo 6y ago
this is six
offtop5 6y ago
Love Audacity ! It's such a great tool for editing bits of audio fast. I think the UI is fine for what it does to be honest .
mkl95 6y ago
Congrats to the Audacity team. This project is legendary.
TheActualWalko 6y ago
Glad to see progress made on Audacity! Regrettably, performance on Mac is still very poor. These performance issues motivated me to build https://wavtool.com https://wavtool.com. It's faster for basic recording and navigation, and runs entirely in the browser. It also has a code editor built in, and a bunch of community-made audio effects written in JS.
sloshnmosh 6y ago
Audacity is a great audio editor. Very intuitive GUI and easy to learn and to teach to others. I was able to teach a musician friend of mine to be able to lay tracks, edit and splice in about 20 minutes even though had very little technical abilities. Sometimes too much is a bad thing. Trying to learn something like Pro Tools as a beginner is enough to scare someone away from digital recording/editing
Nition 6y ago
Anyone else remember using Goldwave in the pre-Audacity days, or its multi-track cousin Multiquence?
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  Wow, never would have remembered Goldwave had you not brought it up. My turn: Creative WaveStudio (came with some of the original Sound Blaster cards back in the Win3.1 days) and n-Track Studio
sedatk 6y ago
I've digitized 60 year old reel-to-reel tapes and made adjustments for 60Hz/50Hz differences solely with Audacity. Its value can't be overstated.
nogbit 6y ago
One of the best and most consistent open source projects over the years. You should be proud, well done.
tialaramex 6y ago
One small thing that bothered me in Audacity last time I checked was that it showed "stairstep" style zero order hold when you zoom in enough for samples to be shown as one more than one horizontal pixel - rather than the reality of a sinusoidal curve for the waveform. 25 years ago it was reasonable to argue that you just couldn't afford the performance cost of calculating and displaying even a halfway accurate approximation, but that's a pretty weak argument today. Stairstep displays reinforce a bunch of erroneous beliefs about digital audio. There are of course some great material like https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell to debunk those beliefs, but they'd be less likely to arise if all the tooling people used didn't implicitly reinforce them. Did they fix that any time since? Sadly I would guess not.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ddingus 6y ago
  Isn't it better to show the actual data, not what its analog product is? Frankly, that approximation would be wrong in many cases, and would very significantly complicate the visual presentation as well as impact UX. There is a lot of work here. Actual gains are marginal, risks quite high. Those steps are the data being manipulated. Displaying the product of the data only would be confusing in another direction. So, both would be required. That is where all the work is, and in terms of priority the case for this kind of thing is super weak, IMHO. Seems to me you are framing this as a fix when it is not actually a problem. It is an enhancement request. While I agree with you, and learned about these things myself! I felt much better about a lot of concerns, but I must also say I find very little utility in a computed visualization of this kind. It would be spiffy, but would add almost no real value.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    > Isn't it better to show the actual data, not what its analog product is? A stairstep isn't "the actual data". The actual data is a series of impulses. While it is possible that somewhere inside a component of your hardware there's a DAC which is creating zero order hold signals to feed into a reconstruction filter as one cheap way to make the PCM data into analogue audio, Audacity has no way to know that and there's no reason either Audacity or its user should care. > Frankly, that approximation would be wrong in many cases You could easily plot a curve that's more accurate than the user's display. You can't see inaccuracies that are smaller than a pixel. There's already suitable code for this calculation (it's called a resampler) inside Audacity. > Those steps are the data being manipulated. Again nope, you're manipulating PCM data, an Excel-style view of lists of signed integers would be much closer to "the data being manipulated" in this sense but you presumably don't think that's a good idea. Your apparent confusion as to what's real here despite having "learned about these things" is exactly why I was pleased to see in the other reply that Audacity now shows lollipop sticks illustrating the actual impulses once you zoom in far enough to see them. If lollipops are the thing we're showing most users for the next twenty years I have my hopes that conversations like this will become no more necessary than arguing with Flat Earthers.
mikece 6y ago
I have relied on Audacity for audio editing for 15 years and challenge all HN readers to join me in giving value for value to this project. In those 15 years I've used a few different paid products but I keep coming back to Audacity because it's power and simplicity allows me to speed through editing projects in less time than it would take me to learn other products... and it's good enough that I don't feel like I'm missing anything. My donation to the project is so long overdue!!!
IBCNU 6y ago
Audacity, OBS. Let's hear it for open source! True hero's of the creative space of tech.
chrisweekly 6y ago
Somehow I'm not surprised to learn that the inimitable SQLite is powering this seismic shift in this venerable package.
sriku 6y ago
Nice to see sqlite3 as the file format of choice. It is known to be quite a bit faster than the file system for large number of small files .. though I'm not sure Audacity's case aligns with that. The file system is expected to be slightly faster for larger blobs, but sqlite3 can be like 10x faster than the file system in windows10 for blobs in the 100s of kB range. Overall, it looks like it might be a great performance boost when working with highly edited fragments and at worst a slight performance degradation for large unedited tracks. https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html
marttt 6y ago
I love Audacity, particularly after discovering the "Enable Cut Lines" feature [0], which is a nice solution for poor man's non-destructive editing. Eric S. Raymond considered Audacity a great example of Linux UI design in "The Art of Unix Programming" [1]. I do, however, think mhwaveedit [2] deserves more attention. A really well thought out UI; excellent for small edits on Linux. It was also a direct inspiration for the writer of the mtpaint graphics editor [3]. 0: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=39688#p102880 https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=39688#p102880 1: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch06s01.html#audacity http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch06s01.html#aud... 2: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint
- app4soft 6y ago
  > A really well thought out UI; excellent for small edits on Linux. It was also a direct inspiration for the writer of the mtPaint graphics editor. I prefer AzPainter[0] instead of mtPaint. [0] https://git.io/azpainter https://git.io/azpainter
happyconcepts 6y ago
On windows for me to add .m4a access I must install an .exe with the warning that the publisher cannot be verified. Is there not a "safer" way in 2021?
pfortuny 6y ago
No way to donate any money? I am using it a lot but do not have the time to contribute otherwise.
cdrini 6y ago
> Nevertheless, this was a huge change, and we decided it was too risky to include many other changes we wanted to make at the same time – so 3.0.0 is almost entirely about this big format change. I just absolutely love this sentiment! It gives me so much faith in their organisation.
Loic 6y ago
Last week, my son had to make a podcast for school. He created a series of small sequences with his mobile and I told him I would make a big mp3 out of it. I had never used a sound manipulation software before, but within 2h (including downloading and installing the software) I was able to import all the files (It was not intuitive, I had to search a bit), cut stuff, put a bit of a piano stuff he played with fade in/out effect and create a nice 2 minute mp3. I was blown away by the final quality for so little work.
jokoon 6y ago
I wish there was a similar equivalent for video editing. I tried vinci but it crashed the first time I tried it. Avidemux is nice, but I can hardly add text or do simple effect with it, maybe with some scripting? The new windows video editor is pretty good too, but features are quite limited. I have some nice ideas for /r/highqualitygifs but I really don't want to use a professional video editor. There are libraries to decode and render video with sfml and sdl, and i guess I could easily build a tailored editor myself with adequate ffmpeg commands...
- otterpro 6y ago
  I use the free Davinci Resolve regularly (not sure which OS you're on) and it is stable on both Mac and Windows. Haven't tried on Linux since install on non-Centos is a little complex. If not using Davinci Resolve, I recommend Shotcut, which is a very capable, easy-to-use, cross-platform, open-source, and probably the most stable free open source editor out of others (ie Kdenlive, Openshot, etc).
- mmwelt 6y ago
  I've found Shotcut[1] to be pretty good. It's not quite professional, but not at all hard to learn as an amateur. It is also open source, and works on Windows, Linux and macOS. [1] https://shotcut.org https://shotcut.org

1065 points by app4soft 6y ago

Thanks for the great work, Audacity is my to-go audio maker for multiple years. It's like gimp for graphics, vlc for video playing, what a god send.

TomMasz 6y ago

I use a Mac, which has GarageBand installed, and Audacity is still my go-to choice for any audio editing. I just used it to split a stereo track into two mono tracks, something I'm not sure I can do in GarageBand (TBH I didn't look since I had Audacity).

michael-ax 6y ago

* labeled silences! * bugs i've never run into; fixed * the pile of files -> a single .aup3 --> Thanks to all involved!

john4532452 6y ago

If there anything that Audactity can do which blender can not ? I plan to learn video editing using blender and don't want to learn another tool if blender can do everything Audactiy does.

EamonnMR 6y ago

Audacity is a great tool. It's not a DAW and doesn't try to be one; I find myself using it most when I need to do a quick edit on a sound or make a recording and I'll be done before my DAW would even have started up.

sidpatil 6y ago
It's like the Microsoft Paint of audio editing.
- xuhu 6y ago
  More like the GIMP of audio editing.
  - scubbo 6y ago
    I think the point of the original comment was that, no, it's precisely _not_ that. The functionality isn't super deep, broad, nuanced, or customizable - but it is enough to get _most_ jobs done.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      > The functionality isn't super deep, broad, nuanced, or customizable Having used Audacity quite a bit, my impression is the exact opposite. Indeed, those traits are exactly why Audacity's UI is currently as "clunky" as it is: because there's a veritable smörgåsbord of features that need encapsulated. "Audacity is the GIMP of audio" is perfectly accurate in this regard. But GIMP ain't Inkscape, and Audacity ain't Ardour.
      - haberman 6y ago
        > "Audacity is the GIMP of audio" is perfectly accurate in this regard. This statement brings back a fond memory for me. I was first introduced to open-source software in the late 90s, when I was in high school. GIMP was one of the best known and most popular pieces of open-source software at the time. At the time there wasn't really an equivalent open-source equivalent for audio that was nearly as feature rich or popular. I remember coming across some programmers around that time who were trying to write "GIMP for audio" -- they called it GWAMP (Gnu Wave Audio Manipulation Program) -- but it never really took off. Then a few years later, when I was in college, I came across a programmer named Dominic Mazzoni who was working on this pre-1.0 program he called Audacity. It was still in the early stages, and didn't have anyone else working on it except his PhD advisor who had written a lot of the DSP code. Dominic and I hit it off, and I spent a lot of my college free time hacking on it, as other contributors started joining the effort too. And then it went on to succeed beyond my wildest dreams (thanks mostly to Dominic and others -- I was just in the right place at the right time). If you had told me in the 90s that I'd have a chance to get in on the ground floor of a program that, 20 years later, was still being called the "GIMP of audio", it would have sounded too good to be true.
megablast 6y ago
I guess everyone should know what a DAW is.
- btown 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation

vz8 6y ago

I'm happy to hear about the new file format. The prior "piles of files" were a problem when saving to folders watched by Dropbox / OneDrive. Thanks Audacity, for an excellent tool!

maxfurman 6y ago

I'm pretty sure all of the songs I recorded in high school are gone forever, since I only backed up the Audacity files and not the entire folder. Perhaps this is for the best, but either way I'm glad future emo teens will have an easier time preserving their work.

Igelau 6y ago
Maximum emo-ness: the darkness in these songs is so irredeemable that even the project file couldn't save them.
falcolas 6y ago
My wife did the exact same thing in transferring the files between her computer and mine. This is one thing that could definitely be made a lot better.
- latexr 6y ago
  I was made better. The most important feature they highlight is the new format which contains everything.

shmerl 6y ago

I wish developers would merge the XDG Base Directory support patches.

saghul 6y ago

Thanks Audacity team and contributors! I love to see major releases from tools I've been using for decades. So dependable, always ready to save my bacon when I need it.

nvr219 6y ago

Audacity is one of the best open source software products out there. Grats on the release!!!!

codetrotter 6y ago

Interesting that they decided to change the project format from bag of files to single file. I certainly remember when I was new to computers and I was using some software and brought only the project file with me to a friend and didn’t know I had to bring the source files also. But after the first time of making that mistake I learned from it. Personally I still like the bag of files approach for music and video projects because it keeps the source files accessible and I use a few different pieces of software and don’t want my source files locked into a project files (even when it’s a SQLite based approach like Audacity 3). And for me personally I don’t want to duplicate files on my local storage medium either. But I can see how it will be helpful to users in general. macOS has a really interesting feature that allows bag of files to appear like a single file to users but it’s actually just a directory and you can still access the files inside by opening it as a directory. Of course that doesn’t help for cross platform software though, as on other platforms you will still only see it as the bag of files that it really is.

rectang 6y ago
> macOS has a really interesting feature that allows bag of files to appear like a single file I think this is what you're referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_(macOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_(macOS) I used to have problems with running out of file descriptors on MacOS, and I recall that the maximum number was 256. I was wondering if this package abstraction could be used to work around it. But then I checked `ulimit -a` and it looks like on Big Sur the max is now 2560. Progress!
- quesera 6y ago
  The wikipedia article does not mention the most common example -- .app "files"/bundles. E.g.: zsh% ls Applications/Firefox.app/Contents CodeResources Library PkgInfo _CodeSignature Info.plist MacOS Resources
- codetrotter 6y ago
  > I think this is what you're referring to Almost. I was actually referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_(macOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_(macOS) which is the same concept. See also https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Miscellaneous/Reference/UTIRef/Articles/System-DeclaredUniformTypeIdentifiers.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009259-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Mi...

klodolph 6y ago

> We also fixed over 160 bugs that had been accumulating over the years. This is good news indeed. Previous versions of Audacity are so buggy that they're barely usable. Version 2.4.2 crashed more often than not when I used it.

yesenadam 6y ago
That doesn't seem fair. I used Audacity a lot for all kinds of things over the years, (most recently 2.3.3 on a Mac) and it never crashed or even behaved weirdly.
- klodolph 6y ago
  Why doesn't it seem fair? I've used Audacity from time to time over the past 15 years or so. I've had so many bad experiences with it that I try to use alternatives whenever reasonable. I've used it on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux on different hardware configurations. It's the only piece of software that has ever physically hurt me, to my knowledge (on some platforms it adjusts system volume without warning). It's been buggy as hell and I've had some profoundly negative experiences using it.
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    Doesn't seem fair because "Previous versions of Audacity are so buggy that they're barely usable." isn't true. Sounds like it was true for you, but not most other people. Otherwise it wouldn't be so popular, would it. I've never noticed a bug using it. Maybe you're doing particular things with it that I never tried to do, like I never used most of the effects.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      I am tired of having people tell me that my criticisms of Audacity are invalid or unfounded. “Audacity is fine, you must be using it wrong,” is what I’m hearing here. I’ve heard it before. Last time I used Audacity, it was version 2.4.2, which is the previous version before 3.0. It adjusted the system volume against my wishes, worked for about five minutes, and crashed. I gave it another shot—tried running it again, but it crashed again fairly quickly. I have no fucking clue what I could possibly be doing wrong. I was not trying to make it crash, I didn’t think I was doing anything unusual. No esoteric formats, no bizarre hardware configurations, no plugins. When you make comments like that, I feel like my concerns are just being dismissed as invalid. The argument that Audacity is popular and therefore it must not be buggy makes no sense to me. People will use buggy software if they still get work done.

rsj_hn 6y ago

I was taking a zoom class and they released some youtube videos in which the vocabulary words were pronounced by a native speaker. I downloaded Audacity, grabbed the youtube video with python's youtube downloader, and was able to splice up the recording into individual vocab words and put them on my Anki cards. So Audacity helped me to learn a foreign language. Thanks!

tony 6y ago

For those interested Audacity's underlying design, it's featured in The Architecture of Open Source Applications: https://www.aosabook.org/en/audacity.html https://www.aosabook.org/en/audacity.html There's a section that references .aup files, see 2.6. BlockFiles (Audacity 3.0.0 introduces the .aup3 file format) The most memorable parts of this to me was wXWidgets. Here's ShuttleGUI: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/master/src/ShuttleGui.cpp https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/master/src/Shuttle...

app4soft 6y ago
Also may recommend to read FLOSS Manuals' book on Audacity[0] [0] https://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/_full/ https://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/_full/ [1] https://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/_info/ https://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/_info/ [PDF] https://flossmanuals.net/pub/audacity-en-2018.02.pdf https://flossmanuals.net/pub/audacity-en-2018.02.pdf [EPub] https://flossmanuals.net/pub/audacity-en-2018.02.epub https://flossmanuals.net/pub/audacity-en-2018.02.epub

tomduncalf 6y ago

Audacity is a great project and I’m very glad it exists. Personally I only need pretty basic wave editing and am happy with OcenAudio (https://ocenaudio.com https://ocenaudio.com - free but closed source), it’s the closest thing I’ve found to Cool Edit 2000 (which I still think is the best wave editor ever!) and has quite a nice UI.

brtkdotse 6y ago
Cool Edit became Adobe Audition and is still very nice to work with.
- tomduncalf 6y ago
  I tried it out a while back and it felt really heavyweight for what I needed (often just trim, normalise, export)... so I’m happy with a lightweight, fast wave editor, then I do anything more involved in a DAW. Thanks for the recommendation though!

schlowmo 6y ago

Very pleased that Audacity is still actively developed. I said it before but I think this can't be overstated: Audacity may had some quirks over the years but it's still one of the most (if not the most) accessible tool for audio editing by non-professionals with an adequate feature set. It's used by community radio stations all over the world since it's easy to teach and cross-platform while being free.

simias 6y ago
Audacity is a godsend for amateur audio makers, but man the UI is really really clunky. If I was a rich philanthropist I'd throw them some money to gut the core of the software and rebuild a decent user interface around it. But hey, UI is hard and audio processing UIs are probably harder than most.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  To me it looks like the bigger problem is the lack of decent GTK controls for multimedia/music production. A lot of Linux/FOSS software suffers from that limitation, Audacity being just one of them. To be honest, most Windows based plugins also historically came with their own interface because the stock UI wasn't good/fast/pretty enough for some uses (knobs, waveform display and manipulation, etc) although I believe today it shouldn't be too hard to start the development of a FOSS generic multiplatform widgets kit that doesn't suck for that purpose.
- rosmax_1337 6y ago
  I completely understand that people find the UI offputting. But the UI is effective. Or maybe I should say the UX is effective? Either way, an effective UI/UX is more than what a lot of "newer and fancier" UIs have going for them. And since the application is meant as a tool for creators, and not a product facing consumers (as a website might be), personally I can completely forgive a "clunky ui", as long as it is logically laid out and with normal workflows.
  - Guest42 6y ago

jan_Inkepa 6y ago

Audacity is a wonderful piece of software - I've used it in a lot of projects for mastering/tweaking sound-effects. And it's come a very long way in terms of stability. Long may it continue to thrive :)

app4soft 6y ago

JFTR, There is already a project[0,1,2] on adding Audacity into Blender: > The Blender & Audacity add-on playing both apps in sync - without Jack - so you can edit sound in Audacity and using Blender as video player [0] https://github.com/tin2tin/audacity_tools_for_blender/ https://github.com/tin2tin/audacity_tools_for_blender/ [1] https://twitter.com/tintwotin/status/1371885605735530500 https://twitter.com/tintwotin/status/1371885605735530500 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61Zvb8AipA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61Zvb8AipA

VectorLock 6y ago

I remember seeing this project launched at CodeCon way way back in the day and I'm happy its been cruising along ever since.

dvirsky 6y ago

Audacity is an awesome project. I know a LOT of non technical people with no affinity to open source who are using it. I think a UI refresh to something modern looking will help it increase its popularity even more, I hope they find someone to help with this.

ShaneMcGowan 6y ago

Love to see audacity still going strong, was one of the first audio tools I used for music production back in the day and is a great piece of software

sedeki 6y ago

Did they fix the macOS issue(s)? You had to run Audacity from the command line for whatever reason from macOS Catalina.

roddylindsay 6y ago

Thank you Audacity for an absolutely indispensable piece of software for anyone who works with audio.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Ugh. FOSSHub. That enormous VPN downloader at the top. It took me some time to remember to avoid it. I do luvs me Audacity, though. Good show!

app4soft 6y ago
FOSS Torrents team already provided `.torrent` downloads for Audacity 3.0.0.[0,1] [0] https://twitter.com/FossTorrents/status/1372176177708818433 https://twitter.com/FossTorrents/status/1372176177708818433 [1] https://fosstorrents.com/softwares/audio/audacity/ https://fosstorrents.com/softwares/audio/audacity/

rosmax_1337 6y ago

Fantastic. Audacity keeps it simple and does it well, if there was ever a hall of fame of applications, Audacity deserves a spot. Heck, if I were to distribute any kind of "creative suite", I would always include Audacity, no matter what operating system I was targeting. It is a near essential tool for working with audio, daily, or every now and then. The genius of the application is that it does not try to be more than a waveform editor. Oftentimes, no matter if you are new to audio production or a veteran audio technician, you just need to edit some sound, and Audacity lets you get it done in a easy enough way for newbies, and in a complex enough way for veterans. Maintainers of projects like these should carry themselves with pride. Projects that stand the test of time and continue to deliver exactly what you needed is what makes the IT-world go around.

zbendefy 6y ago
yup, vscode, blender, audacity, gimp, inkscape and openshot running on linux can get you very far for basically 0 software cost. Its great to have an array of these tools provided for free
- FlashBlaze 6y ago
  While I'm not using linux it really is amazing how far FOSS can take you. I haven't used openshot but can definitely vouch for kdenlive[0] [0] https://kdenlive.org/en/ https://kdenlive.org/en/
ddingus 6y ago
Entirely seconded. What people really need is there, works, is just not a big deal to get done. Well done.

dang 6y ago

If curious, past threads: Audacity 2.2.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15621681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15621681 - Nov 2017 (146 comments) The Future of Audacity, Interview with the Team - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392035 - April 2015 (28 comments) Removing background noise in Audacity by differencing stereo channels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6158058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6158058 - Aug 2013 (13 comments) Audacity 2.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3714766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3714766 - March 2012 (63 comments) Learning a new language with Audacity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2962284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2962284 - Sept 2011 (9 comments)

Humphrey 6y ago

While I use Logic for making "real" audio, Audacity is great for those other audio tasks. For example, I used Audacity's "Import Raw Data" feature to open a dd image of a USB drive to recover corrupted audio FTW!

lukevp 6y ago
Interesting, I guess this only works to recover uncompressed wav files where you know the sample frequency and bit depth? Or does it read the wav headers when it finds them or something?
- Humphrey 6y ago
  Yes you are correct! My 12 channel mixer (Behringer X12) allows you to plug in a USB disk and record the output. But somebody turned off the mixer while it was recording, which meant that lots of bits of data were written, but the WAV file header was never updated with the size of the file. So I did another recording to determine the frequency & bit depth, and then opened the dd disk image with those settings. It was pretty obvious from the waveform image which parts of the drive had the recording, and it was perfect. Interestingly, I got those settings completely wrong at the start, and I could still tell it was music by listening to it, it was just very corrupted sounding!

marcodiego 6y ago

Audacity is an example that being good enough is enough. It probably doesn't competes against industry giants, but considering its simplicity and license, it is probably the most used audio editor in use today. Congrats audaciteam! Disclaimer: I was a contributor a long time ago to the noise filter effect.

corytheboyd 6y ago

If ever we needed to archive timeless bits is software to rebuild society with, Audacity would definitely be on that list.

nickjj 6y ago

I have to commend Audacity for making a tool so easy to use that regular (but technical) folks can use it with no prior recording experience. It being cross platform and runnable on so many devices due to low hardware requirements is a big perk too. I've recorded 70+ episodes of the Running in Production podcast[0] and to get the highest quality audio I can for the show I ask guests to locally record their side of the conversation with Audacity while I do the same on my end. Then we talk in real-time over Zoom to have the actual conversation. Out of 70+ episodes there hasn't been a single case where something went wrong due to Audacity. These are shows where we're continuously recording for 60-90 minutes too. All I ended up doing was write up a quick guide. Basically how to download it, making sure your "good" mic is selected and doing a test recording. No one has ever complained that the process was too involved or hard to follow. Most folks get set up in less than 2 minutes with no assistance and most guests have never recorded audio before. [0]: https://runninginproduction.com/ https://runninginproduction.com/

FlashBlaze 6y ago
Love your podcast!
- nickjj 6y ago
  Hey, thanks a lot for listening to it.
btown 6y ago
Would you be able to share a copy of the guide?
- nickjj 6y ago
  Sure, it's all text based that I send in an email. The Audacity specific part of the guide is: --- 3. Locally recording our own individual audio tracks Programs like Zoom and Google Hangouts are great for talking in real-time but their audio quality is extremely low for a podcast. So we'll be recording our own individual audio tracks. Basically that means you'll want to download a tool so that you can press record on your own computer, record your side of things and then be in a position to send me the exported result of that. Then I'll combine our tracks together in the end. Don't worry, we'll do an audio test and double check things together on the call to make sure things are set up properly before we hit record. If you're not already familiar with tools to locally record your own audio track you can try using https://www.audacityteam.org/ https://www.audacityteam.org/. It's free, open source and works on all major platforms. It's a fantastic tool. After starting Audacity there will be a drop down box near the top of the toolbar where you can select your microphone. If you have multiple microphones please make sure your best microphone is selected. macOS and Linux users can use the defaults for everything else. If you're on Windows there is a drop down box that says MME to the left of where you pick your microphone. You should change that to Windows WASAPI to ensure you get good quality audio. Next up you can try recording yourself a few times to get the hang of the program. You can do that by pressing the big red button. After doing so when you speak into your microphone you should see a bunch of blue bars and lines scroll across your screen. That's good! It means your microphone is picking up your voice. You can confirm if things recorded properly by pressing stop and then playing back your recording. You should hear yourself loud and clear. If you can't then make sure your headphones or speakers are selected in the drop down box to the right of your mic. If you want to send me a sample that would be fine, but you don't have to. After we finish our call, it will be very important to stop the recording, save the project and then export it to both wav and mp3 files (just to be safe). You can do that by going to the File menu and then picking Save Project -> Save Project. You can save it anywhere you want. That will ensure your recording gets saved in case something catastrophic happens while exporting the files, such as the power going out or Audacity crashing for whatever reason. Lastly, you'll want to do a File -> Export and then choose wav. Once that finishes you'll want to do the same thing for mp3. The default settings are fine. Keep in mind the recording will be roughly 60 minutes long when we do it for real which will take up about 400-500 MB of disk space, so make sure you have at least 1 GB of space to be safe before recording.

TestPersonTwo 6y ago

this is six

offtop5 6y ago

Love Audacity ! It's such a great tool for editing bits of audio fast. I think the UI is fine for what it does to be honest .

mkl95 6y ago

Congrats to the Audacity team. This project is legendary.

TheActualWalko 6y ago

Glad to see progress made on Audacity! Regrettably, performance on Mac is still very poor. These performance issues motivated me to build https://wavtool.com https://wavtool.com. It's faster for basic recording and navigation, and runs entirely in the browser. It also has a code editor built in, and a bunch of community-made audio effects written in JS.

sloshnmosh 6y ago

Audacity is a great audio editor. Very intuitive GUI and easy to learn and to teach to others. I was able to teach a musician friend of mine to be able to lay tracks, edit and splice in about 20 minutes even though had very little technical abilities. Sometimes too much is a bad thing. Trying to learn something like Pro Tools as a beginner is enough to scare someone away from digital recording/editing

Nition 6y ago

Anyone else remember using Goldwave in the pre-Audacity days, or its multi-track cousin Multiquence?

hunter2_ 6y ago
Wow, never would have remembered Goldwave had you not brought it up. My turn: Creative WaveStudio (came with some of the original Sound Blaster cards back in the Win3.1 days) and n-Track Studio

sedatk 6y ago

I've digitized 60 year old reel-to-reel tapes and made adjustments for 60Hz/50Hz differences solely with Audacity. Its value can't be overstated.

nogbit 6y ago

One of the best and most consistent open source projects over the years. You should be proud, well done.

tialaramex 6y ago

One small thing that bothered me in Audacity last time I checked was that it showed "stairstep" style zero order hold when you zoom in enough for samples to be shown as one more than one horizontal pixel - rather than the reality of a sinusoidal curve for the waveform. 25 years ago it was reasonable to argue that you just couldn't afford the performance cost of calculating and displaying even a halfway accurate approximation, but that's a pretty weak argument today. Stairstep displays reinforce a bunch of erroneous beliefs about digital audio. There are of course some great material like https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell to debunk those beliefs, but they'd be less likely to arise if all the tooling people used didn't implicitly reinforce them. Did they fix that any time since? Sadly I would guess not.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ddingus 6y ago
Isn't it better to show the actual data, not what its analog product is? Frankly, that approximation would be wrong in many cases, and would very significantly complicate the visual presentation as well as impact UX. There is a lot of work here. Actual gains are marginal, risks quite high. Those steps are the data being manipulated. Displaying the product of the data only would be confusing in another direction. So, both would be required. That is where all the work is, and in terms of priority the case for this kind of thing is super weak, IMHO. Seems to me you are framing this as a fix when it is not actually a problem. It is an enhancement request. While I agree with you, and learned about these things myself! I felt much better about a lot of concerns, but I must also say I find very little utility in a computed visualization of this kind. It would be spiffy, but would add almost no real value.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  > Isn't it better to show the actual data, not what its analog product is? A stairstep isn't "the actual data". The actual data is a series of impulses. While it is possible that somewhere inside a component of your hardware there's a DAC which is creating zero order hold signals to feed into a reconstruction filter as one cheap way to make the PCM data into analogue audio, Audacity has no way to know that and there's no reason either Audacity or its user should care. > Frankly, that approximation would be wrong in many cases You could easily plot a curve that's more accurate than the user's display. You can't see inaccuracies that are smaller than a pixel. There's already suitable code for this calculation (it's called a resampler) inside Audacity. > Those steps are the data being manipulated. Again nope, you're manipulating PCM data, an Excel-style view of lists of signed integers would be much closer to "the data being manipulated" in this sense but you presumably don't think that's a good idea. Your apparent confusion as to what's real here despite having "learned about these things" is exactly why I was pleased to see in the other reply that Audacity now shows lollipop sticks illustrating the actual impulses once you zoom in far enough to see them. If lollipops are the thing we're showing most users for the next twenty years I have my hopes that conversations like this will become no more necessary than arguing with Flat Earthers.

mikece 6y ago

I have relied on Audacity for audio editing for 15 years and challenge all HN readers to join me in giving value for value to this project. In those 15 years I've used a few different paid products but I keep coming back to Audacity because it's power and simplicity allows me to speed through editing projects in less time than it would take me to learn other products... and it's good enough that I don't feel like I'm missing anything. My donation to the project is so long overdue!!!

IBCNU 6y ago

Audacity, OBS. Let's hear it for open source! True hero's of the creative space of tech.

chrisweekly 6y ago

Somehow I'm not surprised to learn that the inimitable SQLite is powering this seismic shift in this venerable package.

sriku 6y ago

Nice to see sqlite3 as the file format of choice. It is known to be quite a bit faster than the file system for large number of small files .. though I'm not sure Audacity's case aligns with that. The file system is expected to be slightly faster for larger blobs, but sqlite3 can be like 10x faster than the file system in windows10 for blobs in the 100s of kB range. Overall, it looks like it might be a great performance boost when working with highly edited fragments and at worst a slight performance degradation for large unedited tracks. https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html

marttt 6y ago

I love Audacity, particularly after discovering the "Enable Cut Lines" feature [0], which is a nice solution for poor man's non-destructive editing. Eric S. Raymond considered Audacity a great example of Linux UI design in "The Art of Unix Programming" [1]. I do, however, think mhwaveedit [2] deserves more attention. A really well thought out UI; excellent for small edits on Linux. It was also a direct inspiration for the writer of the mtpaint graphics editor [3]. 0: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=39688#p102880 https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=39688#p102880 1: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch06s01.html#audacity http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch06s01.html#aud... 2: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint

app4soft 6y ago
> A really well thought out UI; excellent for small edits on Linux. It was also a direct inspiration for the writer of the mtPaint graphics editor. I prefer AzPainter[0] instead of mtPaint. [0] https://git.io/azpainter https://git.io/azpainter

happyconcepts 6y ago

On windows for me to add .m4a access I must install an .exe with the warning that the publisher cannot be verified. Is there not a "safer" way in 2021?

pfortuny 6y ago

No way to donate any money? I am using it a lot but do not have the time to contribute otherwise.

cdrini 6y ago

> Nevertheless, this was a huge change, and we decided it was too risky to include many other changes we wanted to make at the same time – so 3.0.0 is almost entirely about this big format change. I just absolutely love this sentiment! It gives me so much faith in their organisation.

Loic 6y ago

Last week, my son had to make a podcast for school. He created a series of small sequences with his mobile and I told him I would make a big mp3 out of it. I had never used a sound manipulation software before, but within 2h (including downloading and installing the software) I was able to import all the files (It was not intuitive, I had to search a bit), cut stuff, put a bit of a piano stuff he played with fade in/out effect and create a nice 2 minute mp3. I was blown away by the final quality for so little work.

jokoon 6y ago

I wish there was a similar equivalent for video editing. I tried vinci but it crashed the first time I tried it. Avidemux is nice, but I can hardly add text or do simple effect with it, maybe with some scripting? The new windows video editor is pretty good too, but features are quite limited. I have some nice ideas for /r/highqualitygifs but I really don't want to use a professional video editor. There are libraries to decode and render video with sfml and sdl, and i guess I could easily build a tailored editor myself with adequate ffmpeg commands...

otterpro 6y ago
I use the free Davinci Resolve regularly (not sure which OS you're on) and it is stable on both Mac and Windows. Haven't tried on Linux since install on non-Centos is a little complex. If not using Davinci Resolve, I recommend Shotcut, which is a very capable, easy-to-use, cross-platform, open-source, and probably the most stable free open source editor out of others (ie Kdenlive, Openshot, etc).
mmwelt 6y ago
I've found Shotcut[1] to be pretty good. It's not quite professional, but not at all hard to learn as an amateur. It is also open source, and works on Windows, Linux and macOS. [1] https://shotcut.org https://shotcut.org