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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 it

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.

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.