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Give me an example for a nice looking OS X audio editor in comparison? I find Pro-Tools (Not a Editor but a Digital Audio Workstation DAW) to be extremely ugly.

by baldfat 12y ago

Give me an example for a nice looking OS X audio editor in comparison? I find Pro-Tools (Not a Editor but a Digital Audio Workstation DAW) to be extremely ugly. https://www.avid.com/US/products/pro-tools-software https://www.avid.com/US/products/pro-tools-software the Open Source Audor is fairly compariable in terms of UI aka hideous http://ardour.org http://ardour.org Waveform editors and video editors really don't need to be pretty and can easily be DEAD ugly. You can pay over a thousand dollars for a cleaning suite and the UI would make you cry. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan12/articles/noise-reduction.htm http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan12/articles/noise-reducti... Professionals : They do not want pretty and will actually avoid products glorified. They just need something that works and allows them to have a work flow that gives them a great product at the end. It takes hours to get things done. There will be some solutions that almost requires a $500-$2,800+++ hardware piece just so you can actually work with the audio because a mouse isn't always the best tool. https://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_shop&view=shop&Itemid=205&select=20 https://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_shop&view=shop&Ite... Pro-Sumer: That would be like Adobe Audition (https://creative.adobe.com/products/audition https://creative.adobe.com/products/audition) which as a UI isn't much better, but it does look nicer and the products have less features and just are not where professionals need to use them. Audition works great for Podcast and Online Education Courses but I used Audacity instead when I did Graduate Class Creation for the College I worked for. Would anyone find Photoshop and the other Adobe design software and Premier to be a nice UI? It really is function over design. PS I love tiled window managers and hate to have to use a mouse when I am working with a desktop computer so I am the last person to have design taste, but I find that this area of computer technology is just so different and a mouse and a nice UI do not make for a good interface. It is very abstract of the physical controllers. Kind of like playing a guitar on a iPad.

rasur 12y ago
I found Cockos' Reaper to be pretty good. Worth checking out, at least.
- baldfat 12y ago
  I hear of Reaper but never seen it out in the wild. Reading up on it makes me very interested in it. I am currently without a DAW that I like. I love Nuendo but I can't 1) afford or 2) Need that kind of product anymore. I really like the GUI hacking and process hacking that it affords. Sounds like a cool idea that might actually have a way for everyone to have a GUI that they are responsible for. Thanks.
k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "Give me an example for a nice looking OS X audio editor in comparison?" Logic Pro X. It looks good and is very functional. It's also a pro DAW. I've used many different DAW's over the years but Logic (in it's latest version) is the only one to have looked any good. However, they have all been functional (easy to find what I need and do what I need to do). Audacity I have always found to have a confusing UI for a product used to do such simple editing. As has been said many times - design isn't about how it looks, it's about how it works.
- baldfat 12y ago
  Logic Pro X is Con-Sumer and not a professional. I did address that Con-Sumer wave editors do look nicer but they are limited in what they can do. For single file wave form editing Audacity actually does more than Logic Pro. It is a good program and you can get a good end product but it certainly isn't professional nor extremely powerful.
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    Logic Pro X is very much a pro tool. There are a wide variety of professional musicians using it. For example Swedish House Mafia. Apple has certainly made it more user friendly to non-professionals and it no longer comes with a pro price point but it still has all the power necessary for pros.
    - baldfat 12y ago
      I know you feel that this is true for you. I will just give you a good example of the review from Sound on Sound which is my favorite source for reviews. Quote: Furthermore, the measures that Apple have taken to simplify the program mean that certain ways of working with previous versions now seem to be impossible. For example, previously if you had multiple Regions open in the Piano Roll editor, double-clicking a note would move you up a level and display only the notes from the Region to which the clicked note belonged. Now, double-clicking a note opens up the Event List (or the Score Editor if you hold down a modifier) and there seems no way to get back to the old way. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep13/articles/pro-x.htm http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep13/articles/pro-x.htm Logic Pro X really does feel like a good tool but the UI has huge waste of real estate and many things became hidden. This was also seen in the Final Cut X release and the major move back to Adobe Premier that it caused.
louhike 12y ago
I do music everyday and I find Audition to be much easier to use. I started to use it after Audacity and I understood how it worked far more quickly. When I want to do something new I do not to search for 10 minutes unlike with Audacity. Audacity is good for its price, but it cannot be compared to "professional" tools. And Pro Tools might be ugly, because it can be explained by the number of features and its use case. It cannot with Audacity.
mojuba 12y ago
Adobe Photoshop and Logic Pro X are the "pro" apps I use often and I can tell you it's relatively to them that Audacity feels like a poorly designed 1990-ish piece of software. Again we can't blame anyone for this, except I could just reiterate my question: why isn't the user experience a primary focus in the FOSS world? And it's not a rhetorical one.

by baldfat 12y ago

rasur 12y ago

I found Cockos' Reaper to be pretty good. Worth checking out, at least.

baldfat 12y ago
I hear of Reaper but never seen it out in the wild. Reading up on it makes me very interested in it. I am currently without a DAW that I like. I love Nuendo but I can't 1) afford or 2) Need that kind of product anymore. I really like the GUI hacking and process hacking that it affords. Sounds like a cool idea that might actually have a way for everyone to have a GUI that they are responsible for. Thanks.

k-mcgrady 12y ago

>> "Give me an example for a nice looking OS X audio editor in comparison?" Logic Pro X. It looks good and is very functional. It's also a pro DAW. I've used many different DAW's over the years but Logic (in it's latest version) is the only one to have looked any good. However, they have all been functional (easy to find what I need and do what I need to do). Audacity I have always found to have a confusing UI for a product used to do such simple editing. As has been said many times - design isn't about how it looks, it's about how it works.

baldfat 12y ago
Logic Pro X is Con-Sumer and not a professional. I did address that Con-Sumer wave editors do look nicer but they are limited in what they can do. For single file wave form editing Audacity actually does more than Logic Pro. It is a good program and you can get a good end product but it certainly isn't professional nor extremely powerful.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  Logic Pro X is very much a pro tool. There are a wide variety of professional musicians using it. For example Swedish House Mafia. Apple has certainly made it more user friendly to non-professionals and it no longer comes with a pro price point but it still has all the power necessary for pros.
  - baldfat 12y ago
    I know you feel that this is true for you. I will just give you a good example of the review from Sound on Sound which is my favorite source for reviews. Quote: Furthermore, the measures that Apple have taken to simplify the program mean that certain ways of working with previous versions now seem to be impossible. For example, previously if you had multiple Regions open in the Piano Roll editor, double-clicking a note would move you up a level and display only the notes from the Region to which the clicked note belonged. Now, double-clicking a note opens up the Event List (or the Score Editor if you hold down a modifier) and there seems no way to get back to the old way. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep13/articles/pro-x.htm http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep13/articles/pro-x.htm Logic Pro X really does feel like a good tool but the UI has huge waste of real estate and many things became hidden. This was also seen in the Final Cut X release and the major move back to Adobe Premier that it caused.

louhike 12y ago

I do music everyday and I find Audition to be much easier to use. I started to use it after Audacity and I understood how it worked far more quickly. When I want to do something new I do not to search for 10 minutes unlike with Audacity. Audacity is good for its price, but it cannot be compared to "professional" tools. And Pro Tools might be ugly, because it can be explained by the number of features and its use case. It cannot with Audacity.

mojuba 12y ago

Adobe Photoshop and Logic Pro X are the "pro" apps I use often and I can tell you it's relatively to them that Audacity feels like a poorly designed 1990-ish piece of software. Again we can't blame anyone for this, except I could just reiterate my question: why isn't the user experience a primary focus in the FOSS world? And it's not a rhetorical one.