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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 i

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!)

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!)