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Another step on the road to having more UX and UI designers get involved with Open Source. It's really exciting to see! Especially happy to see Tantacrul delvi

Another step on the road to having more UX and UI designers get involved with Open Source. It's really exciting to see! Especially happy to see Tantacrul delving into the history and mission of the project. It's one aspect that many UI/UX designers miss which causes massive amounts of wasted effort.

guitarbill 5y ago
Agreed. UX designers are a rare breed in open source, and Tantacrul is a treasure - as is Audacity. I'm also hopeful of the approach. The video is already very respectful of the existing work, UI, and workflows, which is promising.
- AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
  Not enough people appreciate how stable, reliable, and battle-tested Audacity is as an audio production tool. The fact that it's free software only magnifies its usefulness within the audio space. In a former job capacity, I personally oversaw a group of >40,000 individuals all over the globe, who relied on Audacity to make a living. With Tantacrul on the UX side of things, my hope is that nothing too radical is done to negate the expectations of these users, as many of them are not tech-savvy and learning a new interface for them is basically the same as learning a new tool altogether.
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    Would you mind sharing what's the company/project? It seems very interesting.
    - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
      In a past life I was the head of audio production for the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), Audible.com's online production service for independent authors and narrators. My job was to help ensure success for the at-home narrators who had DIY recording rigs setup at their home office.
      - gtirloni 5y ago
        Awesome! Thanks for sharing.
  - jabroni_salad 5y ago
    I do not think you will be seeing any sweeping revamp if that is what you're concerned about. Tantacrul is really focused on smoothing pain points and removing ambiguity. The changes we have seen from him in MuseScore so far have been small but welcome.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Audacity has a lot of low hanging fruits in the UX department. E.g. every single one of these "You have not selected anything to apply [feature X] to. Try pressing Ctrl+A to select everything and try again!" dialogs should just not exist (if nothing is selected, apply to all, done), or when exporting to a format which doesn't do separate tracks and there are multiple tracks in the same channel, Audacity just silently merges them (throwing away data). When recording while a track exists there's some way (outside of punch-and-roll, I think) to have it record into the same track again with no warning, throwing away data. Scrolling is vertical for some reason, even though horizontal scroll is the primary scrolling timelines.
interestica 5y ago
It's great news! The little playful jab on the magnifying glasses suggests we could see some great UI/UX fixes.
cardanome 5y ago
While I am sure Tantacrul will do a great job, as seen by his interest in learning more about the history and existing user base of the software first, I do want to disagree in a more general way. Personally I hate UI changes and I want Audacity to change as little as possible in that regard. It is not a tool that I use regularly so I want to be able to not use it for a year or two, get back to it and still find the same familiar interface. That is not to say that there are not many sensible changes that could be and maybe should be made to Audacity. I am just saying that stability is far more valuable for me. I rather wish for more stability in software than better UI.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Personally I hate UI changes and I want Audacity to change as little as possible in that regard. It is not a tool that I use regularly so I want to be able to not use it for a year or two, get back to it and still find the same familiar interface. And here is the beauty of non-web based software, you can guarantee that you always will! Same executable on your computer represents the same program launched, forever. Things don't change under the hood without you saying "yes", so if you want the UI to remain the same forever, you're welcome to. If you later want to upgrade, you can, but you'll never be forced to.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    Except that "just don't upgrade" is a very bad idea.
    - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      Why?
      - sayhar 5y ago
        Security patches, for one thing, right?
        5y ago

guitarbill 5y ago

Agreed. UX designers are a rare breed in open source, and Tantacrul is a treasure - as is Audacity. I'm also hopeful of the approach. The video is already very respectful of the existing work, UI, and workflows, which is promising.

AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
Not enough people appreciate how stable, reliable, and battle-tested Audacity is as an audio production tool. The fact that it's free software only magnifies its usefulness within the audio space. In a former job capacity, I personally oversaw a group of >40,000 individuals all over the globe, who relied on Audacity to make a living. With Tantacrul on the UX side of things, my hope is that nothing too radical is done to negate the expectations of these users, as many of them are not tech-savvy and learning a new interface for them is basically the same as learning a new tool altogether.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Would you mind sharing what's the company/project? It seems very interesting.
  - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
    In a past life I was the head of audio production for the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), Audible.com's online production service for independent authors and narrators. My job was to help ensure success for the at-home narrators who had DIY recording rigs setup at their home office.
    - gtirloni 5y ago
      Awesome! Thanks for sharing.
- jabroni_salad 5y ago
  I do not think you will be seeing any sweeping revamp if that is what you're concerned about. Tantacrul is really focused on smoothing pain points and removing ambiguity. The changes we have seen from him in MuseScore so far have been small but welcome.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Audacity has a lot of low hanging fruits in the UX department. E.g. every single one of these "You have not selected anything to apply [feature X] to. Try pressing Ctrl+A to select everything and try again!" dialogs should just not exist (if nothing is selected, apply to all, done), or when exporting to a format which doesn't do separate tracks and there are multiple tracks in the same channel, Audacity just silently merges them (throwing away data). When recording while a track exists there's some way (outside of punch-and-roll, I think) to have it record into the same track again with no warning, throwing away data. Scrolling is vertical for some reason, even though horizontal scroll is the primary scrolling timelines.

interestica 5y ago

It's great news! The little playful jab on the magnifying glasses suggests we could see some great UI/UX fixes.

cardanome 5y ago

While I am sure Tantacrul will do a great job, as seen by his interest in learning more about the history and existing user base of the software first, I do want to disagree in a more general way. Personally I hate UI changes and I want Audacity to change as little as possible in that regard. It is not a tool that I use regularly so I want to be able to not use it for a year or two, get back to it and still find the same familiar interface. That is not to say that there are not many sensible changes that could be and maybe should be made to Audacity. I am just saying that stability is far more valuable for me. I rather wish for more stability in software than better UI.

capableweb 5y ago
> Personally I hate UI changes and I want Audacity to change as little as possible in that regard. It is not a tool that I use regularly so I want to be able to not use it for a year or two, get back to it and still find the same familiar interface. And here is the beauty of non-web based software, you can guarantee that you always will! Same executable on your computer represents the same program launched, forever. Things don't change under the hood without you saying "yes", so if you want the UI to remain the same forever, you're welcome to. If you later want to upgrade, you can, but you'll never be forced to.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  Except that "just don't upgrade" is a very bad idea.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    Why?
    - sayhar 5y ago
      Security patches, for one thing, right?
      - 5y ago