13 ms·
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
by 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 agoAudacity 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 agoTo 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 agoI 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 agoI feel as though early 2000s was the peak of UI, they took peak performance and made it look good enough
- app4soft 6y agoWhat about AzPainter[0] UI? [0] https://git.io/azpainter https://git.io/azpainter
- chmod775 6y agoFirst impression: I don't know that software, never used it, not sure how it relates to the GP's post. I just felt like commenting. It's not pretty and looks cluttered, but those are just looks. Those aside, it's probably perfectly serviceable for getting work done. I like UIs where everything is just there (or even where you put it), and you don't need to dig in submenus that may even make you wait for animations. You can build effective muscle memory for this. It also appears it will let you make use of multiple monitors easily. It just doesn't look great because font sizes and spacing is really inconsistent across types of UI elements: buttons get lots of space to breathe with big paddings and margins for some reason, any bar has very little space and gets a tiny font, lists have fonts way larger than everything else, ...
- drivingmenuts 6y agoLooks similar to the Corel interfaces, which were nigh-unusable if you were used to Adobe.
- Guest42 6y agoPerfect, exactly what I was thinking, also was reminded of some of the old erp systems that were fast as lightning and supported thousands of users without breaking, a little on the busy side but refreshing to have all the features accessible
- HelloNurse 6y agoThe AzPainter screenshot is meant to showcase as many tools as possible. For real usage, most of them would be folded away or completely hidden.
- dharma1 6y agoI’m working with the Audacity dev team on a redesign of the UI/UX. More on this soon!
- ketzo 6y agoWow, that's awesome news! I'm super interested in the UI design of really complex applications (like Audacity, or Photoshop, etc.). I would adore some kind of writeup on y'all's design process whenever you towards the end! (Obviously a big ask for someone already doing a bunch of work for free, pls feel free to ignore me; just saying that I'd be interested :D)
- noizejoy 6y agoYou could volunteer ...
- germinalphrase 6y agoEven a short design rationale would be fascinating.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cprecioso 6y agoI think you should check out Tentacruel’s videos on YouTube about the UX of music composing suites!
- jagger27 6y ago*Tantacrul
- xmprt 6y agoI found that video fascinating even though I couldn't really related to any of the tools he was talking about since I've never composed music in the past. Having actually used Audacity and Photoshop, I'd love to learn a bit more about how those design decisions were made.
- zelly 6y agoif someone "upgrades" the UI you just know it's going to be some Typescript/React/Electron monstrosity. so I'll keep the 90s look.
- xedrac 6y agoPlease, do not infect Audacity with Electron.
- jpindar 6y agoLast time I checked, Audacity Portable had a better UI than the regular version, so you might want to try that.
- rhizome 6y agoThing is, audio editors all have pretty much the same feature set, making the UI the differentiator. For instance, I started using Audacity after Sony ruined SoundForge. If I'm going to need a new set of muscle-memories, might as well change canoes into free software.
- noisem4ker 6y agoWhat happened to SoundForge?
- rhizome 6y agoSony changed the UI after they bought it, after v5.0.
- wheels 6y agoFor most of the things Audacity does, Ocenaudio does them in a less clunky way: https://www.ocenaudio.com/ https://www.ocenaudio.com/
- voltagex_ 6y agoDoesn't seem to be open source, though.
- high_byte 6y agomaybe the hardest, but audio softwares tend to have the most innovative designs I've ever seen. (Ableton, Fruity Loops, etc)
- Godel_unicode 6y agoI loved audacity, don't get me wrong, but I don't know why people don't switch to the Fairlight editor embedded in davinci resolve for this. The UI is so much easier to grok. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fairlight https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fai...
- latexr 6y ago> but man the UI is really really clunky. I gave up every time I tried to use it because the UI was fugly to the point of being distracting. > 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. Unless I’m misremembering the software, years ago (a decade?) I planned on doing the next best thing and work on a new icon and UI for them, but soon found an official page which said they weren’t interested in such contributions. The page existed because people kept offering. There’s another commenter on this thread who’s working with them on a redesign, so I’m glad they changed their minds.
- xtracto 6y agoAudacity has a chapter in the "Architecture of Open Source Applications" book ( https://aosabook.org/en/audacity.html https://aosabook.org/en/audacity.html ). It is a nice read to understand the internals of the application and some of the technical challenges the have confronted.
- nick0garvey 6y agoThe main lesson I learned from that chapter was the importance of a clear plugin interface. Especially for software used by people with different needs. This avoids a lot of pull requests into the main code that are unlikely to be maintained.
- dylan604 6y agoYou've used the term plugin interface, but would API be a better fit? Have an API that exposes everything a user would need to see in the UI. Then whatever knob/button/fader/etc can call the same APIs to interact with the data. At that point, you could have a UI on a tablet calling a more powerful laptop/desktop install doing the lifting and connected to monitors/etc. To me, plugins are something that provides additional functionality to the native abilities of the program.
- sethhochberg 6y agoWhen speaking about audio software, people saying plugins do usually mean adding native functionality - plugin formats like VST are implemented as shared libraries that can be called by the host application's hot codepaths (because they are often doing latency sensitive things like processing audio streams). Audacity supports VSTs, AU, and several other major formats for audio processing / instruments, as well as its own proprietary module format. That said, an API around the UI would be great. A lot of commercial audio platforms have moved in this direction, iPad control of commercial mixing consoles and effects processors is common in the industry now. I'd love to see PC-based audio applications go down the same path.
- cmeacham98 6y ago
- Ericson2314 6y ago"MS Paint for sound"
- marcodiego 6y agoI'll agree the day MS Paint becomes multiplatform and FLOSS.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Ericson2314 6y agoI agree, but that wouldn't be so pithy would it? :)
- cmehdy 6y agoDoes this count? https://jspaint.app https://jspaint.app (& github: https://github.com/1j01/jspaint https://github.com/1j01/jspaint )
- waiseristy 6y agoIf we should compare it to any other successful FLOSS project it should be good ol' GIMP
- ObsoleteNerd 6y agoAudacity is up there for me with those open source projects that deserve to go into some form of OSS Hall of Fame. Audacity, VLC, Blender, KeePass, Inkscape, OBS, etc (there's many more but those are the ones I use regularly). Programs that have been around forever, are used by millions every day, and yet continue to do it (and do it damn well) just because they want to.
- shp0ngle 6y agoWith keepass, I always get confused in all the versions and how much are they compatible :(
- ObsoleteNerd 6y agoBasically there's 2 versions of the database file, the old (KDB) and the new (KDBX) which has more features/fields/etc. For the clients, 2.x uses KDBX files, but is also compatible with the older KDB files, while 1.x can only use the older KDB files.
- peterlk 6y agoAbsolutely. I cleaned (removed cursing) more hip hop tracks than I care to remember with the highlight/reverse in Audacity. There is no other program that allowed me to do this so simply and efficiently.
- tomcooks 6y agoOT: Why do you remove curses from music?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dalbasal 6y agoI think audacity might be a good candidate for breaking some "no, that doesn't usually work" rules. Baby Mode - I know this has a history of sucking, but a lot of audacities UI complaints are from users who need one small thing once in a while. Less "G" in the GUI. Audacity is a whole bunch of hard to group commands. Maybe they should just bite the bullet, and incorporate some 80s-ish text navigation UI elements. People are googling "how do I X" anyway.
- ddingus 6y agoKey combos rock. Not sexy, but are fast, easy to learn, and given a search index, fairly discoverable.
- sgtnoodle 6y agoI use it to view time-series data from my homemade ECG logger, to debug whether my heart is beating. All the built in analysis tools are fun to play with, too. It's mildly disappointing that it doesn't really sound like much of anything when played through a speaker.
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoNot just non-professionals, but pros too. When I was working in college radio we used to build quick liners and sweeps in Audacity instead of loading up the heavier programs (I can't remember what they were now actually - maybe Nexgen?) for editing and mixing.
- schlowmo 6y agoYou're right. I didn't meant to say that Audacity isn't for professionals. But in my experience most audio professional (like audio engineers) pick (or get picked by their educational institution) a tool early in their career and stick to it. Most of the times this tool is a full-fledged DAW in which they acquire quite a muscle memory. So switching tools later (even for simple tasks, which don't require a DAW) comes with a big "performance hit".
- mmikeff 6y agoI'm just here to say thank you for Audacity. It's a fantastic tool.