Audacity 2.2.0 Released

I love seeing software that still has a "Screenshots" section of their website. It's looked the same for as long as I've been using computers to record audio, starting with my high school band's demo over 15 years ago.

I could probably make fun of Audacity for not keeping up with the times, but if you look at other DAWs you'll see none are exactly bastions of good interface design. I got a little more serious about my music last year and decided I wanted to invest in a nice DAW, but after demoing I few I felt completely unimpressed. They're nearly identical to how they were 15 years ago, other than my PC being much more powerful. I ended up just sticking with Reaper, and hoping something comes along someday to mix the industry up. Proprietary dongles and tiered versions of the exact same software with gimped features doesn't cut it for me.

This is the only reference I have to it https://imgur.com/7ZoTLX7

Compared to digital vinyl with Serato, I found Mixx to be laggy (and more importantly, lacking of a dedicated next/previous track keys) with a low-end Pioneer DDJ SB. Track controls are replaced with a "hot cue" function, which makes beatmatching without cuepoints unnecessarily cumbersome. Don't recall if the UI had a dedicated next/prev track button but remapping the control scheme meant diving into some javascript datastructure that I wasn't in the right mindset to do at the time. Really wanted to like Mixxx but I could not see how I could perform with it

It's not that. MIDI != PCM or any kind of audio data really

Midi looks like (imagine someone playing two notes: a C then a D):

C4 127 On C4 127 Off D4 127 On D4 127 Off

(not literally, but that is the essence of MIDI)

MIDI support means synthesizer support, which means VST support, which means now you need some sort of MIDI data editor, which means now you've got to work out all the weird timing shit with MIDI, and by this point you are better off with LMMS or FLStudio or Pro Tools or what-have-you. Use the tool most fit for purpose

> but if you look at other DAWs you'll see none are exactly bastions of good interface design

What? Modern "good interface design" (at least by HN standards) has almost nothing to say about complicated 1000+ feature apps. (In fact every time I rant that modern design sucks and that apps need more features the first response I usually get back is, "but that's so much more testing! Do you know how many execution paths we'd have to manage???" Well, that is kind of the point)

Have you ever produced music with any of these tools? For one, their goals are different -- FLStudio, for example, tries to be "the fastest path from your brain to your speakers", and the interface seems as such and is loved for it. Ableton intentionally crams everything into one screen because it is used as a performance tool -- if you've seen any recent photos of Daft Punk et al performing, you'll see it running right there on a laptop, usually above the mixer or the CDJs. Cubase has kept an interface very similar to its original Atari 2600 (I think?) version, because people have been using that app for 30+ years now.

Any time I see new-school UI designers' take on audio apps I cannot help but cringe. They are completely misunderstanding and underestimating their audience -- audio is complicated and we need complex tools to do what we do.