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Audacity 2.2.0 Released

audacityteam.org

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Re: Audacity 2.2.0 Released

#71
post #31

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 m…

> 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…

Have you looked at Ardour [0] too? What's your view of its interface?

[0] https://ardour.org/

Re: Audacity 2.2.0 Released

#73
post #72

Scrolled quickly through the comments and I want to ask one question: How good is this tool compared to commercial software?

When I need 10s of tracks (multiple drum mics, bass, guitars, keyboards, vocal mics, effects, etc.), I prefer to use Cakewalk Sonar. I've also heard good things about Reaper which is pretty inexpensive.

I often end up using Audacity when I'm working on only one or very few tracks (e.g., a video voice over). It works quite nicely for basic edits, trimming, normalizing, etc. without as much clutter (tempo, time signatures, measures, etc.) as some of the more music-oriented packages. With the addition of MIDI tracks, it sounds like Audacity is moving more in that direction but we'll see.

Re: Audacity 2.2.0 Released

#74
post #72

Scrolled quickly through the comments and I want to ask one question: How good is this tool compared to commercial software?

At least a few versions ago it was okay for basic stuff but quite far behind feature-wise to commercial software, which benefit from more integration, more polished UX, and a large bundle of plugins.

Having said that a tool is a tool and in capable hands Audacity is as good a tool as anything.

Re: Audacity 2.2.0 Released

#75
post #45

I've used Audacity off and on for years. Love that it is still around and pretty much _just works_. It does just what I need, as infrequently as I need it, and doesn't require an idiotic (and steep) subscription fee to use (glaring at you Adobe CS).

Honestly, I couldn't disagree more. Audacity is one of the buggiest pieces of open source software I've used. Audio routinely gets corrupted or lost. Their "known issues" page is comically long, and little ever gets fixed. I have a lot of love for them for making audio editing accessible to the masses, but I wish a team would clean the app up like the LibreOffice folks did to OpenOffice.

Oh yeah, it did crash a lot and would get into weird states that would make it hard to recover. Oddly, commercial editing software, even late versions, also had weird corruption issues from time to time, usually when plugins are involved.

Re: Audacity 2.2.0 Released

#77
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other free-as-in-beer software do you use to produce music?

Ardour ( https://ardour.org/ ) and LMMS ( https://lmms.io/ ) are probably the two most popular open-source DAWs. I also really like MuseScore ( https://musescore.org/ ) for composition.

technically Ardour is free as in free speech, but not as in free beer. They do not have official binary downloads for free. If I remember correcyly its more involved than ./configure && make && make install Though Ubuntu Studio has a version ready to go.

Re: Audacity 2.2.0 Released

#78
post #54
post #31

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 m…

Have you tried bitwig? It's fairly new and seems to do alot of things right.

[deleted]

Re: Audacity 2.2.0 Released

#79
post #54
post #31

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 m…

Have you tried bitwig? It's fairly new and seems to do alot of things right.

It was created by a bunch of ex-Ableton engineers so it is heavily influenced by that.

Re: Audacity 2.2.0 Released

#80
post #31

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 m…

> 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…

Its not a DAW its an audio editor than can do multi-track, so its kind of apples to oranges. Its a great tool for recording it even runs well on the pi3. Ardour is great but its too demanding for the pi, runs great on my t420.
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