10 ms·

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

by 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
  I feel as though early 2000s was the peak of UI, they took peak performance and made it look good enough
  - app4soft 6y ago
    What about AzPainter[0] UI? [0] https://git.io/azpainter https://git.io/azpainter
    - chmod775 6y ago
      First 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 ago
      Looks similar to the Corel interfaces, which were nigh-unusable if you were used to Adobe.
    - Guest42 6y ago
      Perfect, 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 ago
      The AzPainter screenshot is meant to showcase as many tools as possible. For real usage, most of them would be folded away or completely hidden.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I use and like Audacity, but it really is clunky. Having to use separate "tools" to edit envelopes, move events, etc. is pretty clunky compared to, say, a DAW like ACID or a commercial audio editor like Soundforge. The active regions for hovers, clicks, and drags (e.g. to resize tracks) really need tweaking as well, and the horizontal scroll after a zoom change is also really hard to predict or control.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bambax 6y ago
  I have tried a few times to use it and man is it bizarre and hostile. SoundForge was fantastic. Now I just do everything in Reaper. Both non-free of course, but Reaper is really cheap and works everywhere and does so much more than just audio editing. Edit: the love Audacity is getting in the comments inspires respect! There is obviously something that I missed...
  - interestica 6y ago
    SoundForge was quite capable back in the day. It was probably one of my first chances to "remix" works and probably helped shape my worldview (as weird as that sounds. Making music from music was a pleasure and not a 'bad' thing).
- simias 6y ago
  Let me be clear, when I say clunky, I mean clunky, not old-fashioned or anything like that. I live in Vim and the terminal. I know perl. I can handle un-shiny UI. To give a concrete example: suppose I want to apply noise cancellation (something very few free audio tools provide I must add, and a really cool feature of Audacity): - You select your track - You go in Effect, you skim through the long (alphabetized) list to find "Noise reduction" - You realize that you forgot to generate your noise profile, so you close the pop up because you can't reselect when the pop up is active - You select your noise reference - You return to Effect, skim through the long (alphabetized) list again, find noise reduction again - You tell it to use the selected audio as noise reference. - You close the window - You select the entire audio again - You return to Effect, skim through the long (alphabetized) list again, find noise reduction again - You can tweak the various reduction parameters, then you can click "preview" again which pops a 2nd window up with a rudimentary audio player that doesn't let you do anything besides listening to the selected audio from the start. You can't focus on a particular zone or anything. If you want to do that you have to apply the noise reduction, close the module, return to the main window, listen to your track on the proper timeline then undo the reduction and return to Effects, skim through the long (alphabetized) list etc... If there's a better way to do any of this I haven't found it. I don't want to really to be too hard on Audacity, I'm genuinely thankful for its existence, but it's not a good example of UI done right IMO. I like minimalism in UI, but I think it works best when it's flexible and composable (like Vim commands for instance). Audacity UI's is neither, it's just a long series of ad-hoc modules.
  - tomcooks 6y ago
    An ultrafast, pipe-able, set of Unix philosophy audio tools with a CLI interface would be great
    - amlib 6y ago
      Like... sox?
      - mickhead23 6y ago
        Sox is beautiful and way faster than GUIs (first comment ever!)
dharma1 6y ago
I’m working with the Audacity dev team on a redesign of the UI/UX. More on this soon!
- ketzo 6y ago
  Wow, 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 ago
    You could volunteer ...
  - germinalphrase 6y ago
    Even a short design rationale would be fascinating.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - cprecioso 6y ago
    I think you should check out Tentacruel’s videos on YouTube about the UX of music composing suites!
    - jagger27 6y ago
      *Tantacrul
    - xmprt 6y ago
      I 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 ago
if 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 ago
  Please, do not infect Audacity with Electron.
jpindar 6y ago
Last time I checked, Audacity Portable had a better UI than the regular version, so you might want to try that.
rhizome 6y ago
Thing 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 ago
  What happened to SoundForge?
  - rhizome 6y ago
    Sony changed the UI after they bought it, after v5.0.
wheels 6y ago
For most of the things Audacity does, Ocenaudio does them in a less clunky way: https://www.ocenaudio.com/ https://www.ocenaudio.com/
- voltagex_ 6y ago
  Doesn't seem to be open source, though.
high_byte 6y ago
maybe the hardest, but audio softwares tend to have the most innovative designs I've ever seen. (Ableton, Fruity Loops, etc)
Godel_unicode 6y ago
I 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.

by simias 6y ago

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
I feel as though early 2000s was the peak of UI, they took peak performance and made it look good enough
- app4soft 6y ago
  What about AzPainter[0] UI? [0] https://git.io/azpainter https://git.io/azpainter
  - chmod775 6y ago
    First 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 ago
    Looks similar to the Corel interfaces, which were nigh-unusable if you were used to Adobe.
  - Guest42 6y ago
    Perfect, 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 ago
    The AzPainter screenshot is meant to showcase as many tools as possible. For real usage, most of them would be folded away or completely hidden.
nitrogen 6y ago
I use and like Audacity, but it really is clunky. Having to use separate "tools" to edit envelopes, move events, etc. is pretty clunky compared to, say, a DAW like ACID or a commercial audio editor like Soundforge. The active regions for hovers, clicks, and drags (e.g. to resize tracks) really need tweaking as well, and the horizontal scroll after a zoom change is also really hard to predict or control.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bambax 6y ago
I have tried a few times to use it and man is it bizarre and hostile. SoundForge was fantastic. Now I just do everything in Reaper. Both non-free of course, but Reaper is really cheap and works everywhere and does so much more than just audio editing. Edit: the love Audacity is getting in the comments inspires respect! There is obviously something that I missed...
- interestica 6y ago
  SoundForge was quite capable back in the day. It was probably one of my first chances to "remix" works and probably helped shape my worldview (as weird as that sounds. Making music from music was a pleasure and not a 'bad' thing).
simias 6y ago
Let me be clear, when I say clunky, I mean clunky, not old-fashioned or anything like that. I live in Vim and the terminal. I know perl. I can handle un-shiny UI. To give a concrete example: suppose I want to apply noise cancellation (something very few free audio tools provide I must add, and a really cool feature of Audacity): - You select your track - You go in Effect, you skim through the long (alphabetized) list to find "Noise reduction" - You realize that you forgot to generate your noise profile, so you close the pop up because you can't reselect when the pop up is active - You select your noise reference - You return to Effect, skim through the long (alphabetized) list again, find noise reduction again - You tell it to use the selected audio as noise reference. - You close the window - You select the entire audio again - You return to Effect, skim through the long (alphabetized) list again, find noise reduction again - You can tweak the various reduction parameters, then you can click "preview" again which pops a 2nd window up with a rudimentary audio player that doesn't let you do anything besides listening to the selected audio from the start. You can't focus on a particular zone or anything. If you want to do that you have to apply the noise reduction, close the module, return to the main window, listen to your track on the proper timeline then undo the reduction and return to Effects, skim through the long (alphabetized) list etc... If there's a better way to do any of this I haven't found it. I don't want to really to be too hard on Audacity, I'm genuinely thankful for its existence, but it's not a good example of UI done right IMO. I like minimalism in UI, but I think it works best when it's flexible and composable (like Vim commands for instance). Audacity UI's is neither, it's just a long series of ad-hoc modules.
- tomcooks 6y ago
  An ultrafast, pipe-able, set of Unix philosophy audio tools with a CLI interface would be great
  - amlib 6y ago
    Like... sox?
    - mickhead23 6y ago
      Sox is beautiful and way faster than GUIs (first comment ever!)

dharma1 6y ago

I’m working with the Audacity dev team on a redesign of the UI/UX. More on this soon!

ketzo 6y ago
Wow, 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 ago
  You could volunteer ...
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  Even a short design rationale would be fascinating.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cprecioso 6y ago
  I think you should check out Tentacruel’s videos on YouTube about the UX of music composing suites!
  - jagger27 6y ago
    *Tantacrul
  - xmprt 6y ago
    I 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 ago

if 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 ago
Please, do not infect Audacity with Electron.

jpindar 6y ago

Last time I checked, Audacity Portable had a better UI than the regular version, so you might want to try that.

rhizome 6y ago

Thing 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 ago
What happened to SoundForge?
- rhizome 6y ago
  Sony changed the UI after they bought it, after v5.0.

wheels 6y ago

For most of the things Audacity does, Ocenaudio does them in a less clunky way: https://www.ocenaudio.com/ https://www.ocenaudio.com/

voltagex_ 6y ago
Doesn't seem to be open source, though.

high_byte 6y ago

maybe the hardest, but audio softwares tend to have the most innovative designs I've ever seen. (Ableton, Fruity Loops, etc)

Godel_unicode 6y ago

I 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.