Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Audacity 4.0

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–278 of 278 posts

Re: Audacity 4.0

#271

Post by marttt »

AbuAssar wrote: post #4

in the age of 500MB apps (thanks to electron); it is refreshing to see a sub-50MB app again.

How big are the project files these days? In the .aup3 format all source material was rendered into one big pile, so with lots of "raw tape" (e.g. for a radio show) the session files became huge. It was annoying to transport an 1.5 GB session file between two machines even via network.

Reaper and Pro Tools (and many other DAWs), in contrast, had the source material in one folder and the session file essentially just documented the edits. These small session files could be exported even via email.

The .aup3 format was one of the reasons why I decided to ditch Audacity3 for radio editing back in the day. And, it used to lag heavily when I had a project with several hundred cuts done via "ripple editing". All this was years ago, though.

I concluded that Audacity v1.2.6 was the high point of this software and, indeed, tried to go back into using that one for a while (in 2019 or 2021 or so)! It was fast enough, very simple, young, raw, robust, but it still had its early 2000s open source enthusiasm charm. :)

As a blast from the past, here's a 2002 publication by the original authors of Audacity on the original file format: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/papers/RBD-papers%20renamed/A%20...

Re: Audacity 4.0

#272

Post by Joel_Mckay »

jcelerier wrote: post #270
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Structurally, Qt is sometimes worse given the compatibility issues. There are desktops where Qt5/Qt6 software runs fine if you can get it to compile, but the GL interface has been broken on many platforms for over a decade. If folks don't plan on maintaining things after a release cycle it no longer matters how one ports disposable code. On mobile the App life cycles are short. Quasar does exactly what Qt has been do…

> There are desktops where Qt5/Qt6 software runs fine if you can get it to compile, but the GL interface has been broken on many platforms for over a decade. do you have example / bugreports of this ? for my app I run tests across a wide range of laptops, platforms and distros, across nvidia / intel / amd / llvmpipe / ... and it all works fine. hell, with the help of Claude I managed to port back the current dev bran…

I am not suggesting your experience isn't true, but personal exposure to Qt over the years has not been as easy going. ymmv

Best of luck, =3

Re: Audacity 4.0

#273

Post by TehCorwiz »

boomlinde wrote: post #256
TehCorwiz wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a bunch of minor versions between 3.0 and 4.0 made up of fundamental refactor work to establish separation of concerns. As I understand it from the call graphs he shared, the problem was that the UI was reaching deep into the audio code directly instead of using a clear API boundary to separate concerns and route commands and change state. So fundamentally while the UI worked, it also was deeply entwined w…

> So, if you're going to have to rewrite your UI layer to disentangle it from your back-end anyway why not also bring it up to speed? So, if you're going to have to rewrite your back-end to disentangle it from your UI layer anyway why not also bring it up to speed?

I don't think you understand the problem they were facing. If they rewrite the backend it would also REQUIRE rewriting the frontend because of how entangled they were. Whereas rewriting the frontend did not require changing the backend as dramatically. So their choices were:

1. Rewrite the whole thing, all at once, ship nothing for a long time.

2. Rewrite the frontend, ship changes incrementally, then move onto the backend once it's been excised from the tangled mess.

Re: Audacity 4.0

#274

Post by wrs »

simonask wrote: post #243
wrs wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of Chesterton’s Fence going on here… I remember thinking this way when I still had a pretty low-level understanding of music (like, “I’m reading arbitrary pitches and pushing the matching keys on the piano”), but once I started understanding bigger musical concepts/chunks, the reason for the notation became clearer, and now I see why it’s a pretty good local maximum for readability. The majority of music uses a…

Totally agree with your comment, but I just wanted to add that the major scales aren’t what’s prioritized - every major scale has a parallel minor scale with the same key signature. In fact, this is true for all diatonic scales, which are the foundation of Western music and have been for centuries. The major scale is just the ionic, the minor is the aeolian. There’s also dorian, phrygian, lydian, etc., and all of the…

That’s exactly why I didn’t say it privileges the major scale; I said it privileges modes of the major scale.

Bjork did have a pretty big song in Locrian that one time. :)

Re: Audacity 4.0

#275

Post by wrs »

KPGv2 wrote: post #253
wrs wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of Chesterton’s Fence going on here… I remember thinking this way when I still had a pretty low-level understanding of music (like, “I’m reading arbitrary pitches and pushing the matching keys on the piano”), but once I started understanding bigger musical concepts/chunks, the reason for the notation became clearer, and now I see why it’s a pretty good local maximum for readability. The majority of music uses a…

> Stringed instruments like guitars guitar is a percussion instrument :D

And piano is a stringed instrument, oops! How about “fretted instrument”?

Re: Audacity 4.0

#276

Post by Lio »

wrs wrote: post #275
KPGv2 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stringed instruments like guitars guitar is a percussion instrument :D

And piano is a stringed instrument, oops! How about “fretted instrument”?

Fretless Bass would like a word… :P

Re: Audacity 4.0

#277

Post by miki123211 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #209
miki123211 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What PE loves to do (and where I think a lot of the vibe comes from) is buying companies from owners who care about the craft and turning them into companies that care about nothing but money. Let's say you make an app for first responders. Being a former first responder, you know exactly what your users need and what the workflows should be like. Your app becomes a brand name in the community. You charge enough to s…

Ooh, who could this be... so many contenders... Aladtect, PSTrax, Lexipol...

I didn't have any specific app in mind (I have stories but not with this specific industry); I brought it up as an illustrative but hypothetical example of the broader phenomenon.

The Applause thing is absolutely real though.

Re: Audacity 4.0

#278

Post by wrs »

Lio wrote: post #276
wrs wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And piano is a stringed instrument, oops! How about “fretted instrument”?

Fretless Bass would like a word… :P

Aaargh! OK, you made me look it up. :) The word is "chordophone" (an instrument that makes sound from vibrating strings). A "fretted" instrument is a chordphone whose pitches are fixed by frets. But I can't find a word for the class I'm talking about, "a chordophone with a fingerboard", as opposed to a piano, which is a chordophone with one string per pitch (and is also a percussion instrument!).
Post reply on HN