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Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

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Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#101

Post by krrrh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that many designers and engineers loathe Usability and Accessibility people (like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman) Which is silly because good UX that works for people with disabilities or impairments also benefits fully able users in the vast majority of cases

In fact, accessibility is probably the last remaining hope of power users[0]. With general-audience software, the market doesn't care much about the minority that are the serious users, and it's hard to make a convincing argument to business people here. However, accessibility does have a strong enough ethical argument behind it, which is also increasingly being backed by regulations. Allowing accessibility tools to…

One of the first things I do on a new Mac is to enable three finger drag. A couple of years ago this option moved fron trackpad settings to accessibility options.

That’s when I understood that I had a disability.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#102

Post by aidenn0 »

chronogram wrote: post #99
benjaminjackman wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really just wish GIMP (and Audacity now that I think about it) had a command palette, where I could type in the name of anything found in the menu or assigned to a keyboard shortcut. I don’t use both of them a lot so all of my time is spent search menus for what I am trying to do.

If you’re using the applications on Linux you can use HUDs like https://github.com/hardpixel/gnome-hud

Does Gimp use the correct api calls for that? I use it, but 90% of GTK apps do not show up.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#103

Post by xahrepap »

benjaminjackman wrote: post #94
shawnz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the GIMP team does understand that and they often put a high focus on UI improvements on their roadmaps. I suppose they just have limited resources to work with.

I really just wish GIMP (and Audacity now that I think about it) had a command palette, where I could type in the name of anything found in the menu or assigned to a keyboard shortcut. I don’t use both of them a lot so all of my time is spent search menus for what I am trying to do.

If you press the ‘/‘ key you can search the menus. Very useful. I use it all the time now :)

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#104

Post by zxzax »

ratww wrote: post #71
btown wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the comments by a MuseScore developer in that thread is much more nuanced: https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu... Essentially it boils down to this: if you see value to society in allowing people to share musical scores with each other, that's fundamentally at odds with a libre software philosophy. Because if you let people share music on a platform, they will inevitably share copyrigh…

No, it's not nuanced. The discussion stops being nuanced as soon as the company starts the discussion with a threat such as "will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content" . At the point the email in the Github issue was written the API was public. It was removed after the repository owner responded, as can be seen on the Internet Archive. No…

I think the wording of that email is bad, but your assessment of the situation is incorrect. The threat of legal action is real and it comes from the copyright holders. The company can't do anything about that, they are being threatened by the same copyright holders. Removing the public API doesn't really change the situation.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#105

Post by robenkleene »

shawnz wrote: post #24
throw_m239339 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. True, Blender really exploded when they re-designed the interface. I hope someday GIMP team understand that. The software is solid, but the interface isn't great. Some very simple workflow changes made Blender easier to use.

I would say the GIMP team does understand that and they often put a high focus on UI improvements on their roadmaps. I suppose they just have limited resources to work with.

Anyone care to chime in about why Blender seems to have the resources for this kind of work but the GIMP doesn’t?

I know Blender has a lot of corporate sponsorship, so I think the explanation is there’s a “commoditize your complements” effect going on. But does anyone have a more specific hypothesis? E.g., why does Blender have so many complements and the GIMP so few?

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#107

Post by TonyTrapp »

robenkleene wrote: post #105
shawnz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the GIMP team does understand that and they often put a high focus on UI improvements on their roadmaps. I suppose they just have limited resources to work with.

Anyone care to chime in about why Blender seems to have the resources for this kind of work but the GIMP doesn’t? I know Blender has a lot of corporate sponsorship, so I think the explanation is there’s a “commoditize your complements” effect going on. But does anyone have a more specific hypothesis? E.g., why does Blender have so many complements and the GIMP so few?

Maybe because there are relatively fewer options for free modeling software, compared to the tons of free 2D graphics programs one can choose from? Putting money into Blender helps those companies getting rid of buggy, expensive 3D software. For 2D graphics, they already have plenty of options.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#108

Post by zxzax »

marcan_42 wrote: post #29
spamalot159 wrote: post #6

My first reaction was "oh no..". Audacity has to be one of the most beloved and widely recommended software of all time. It's not often that an aquisition like this goes well for very long. After looking at MuseScore and UltimateGuitar, however, it looks like they are also free and have a similar aesthetic to Audacity. Maybe this will work out after all.

What scares me is musescore.com. That website went from being a largely free repository of sheet music to a subscription service paying into the music industry, with no support for CC style licenses (it's either public domain or paywalled), locking everyone's sheet music retroactively behind a paywall regardless of actual license, sometimes in violation of said licenses (e.g. anything with a BY-NC or similar style li…

The copyright holders should just upload the sheet music to a different website. There is no requirement for anyone to redistribute a piece of Creative Commons content for free. That's true even with the NC licenses, in that case, the only real option for non-compliance is for the copyright holder to file a takedown notice to get the material removed. I know it seems counter-intuitive since you probably want to download that music, but this is what you're actually asking for.

If the copyright holders are absent then not much is going to be done about this -- that's one of the major reasons why artists join these large copyright holding organizations, to handle this stuff for them!

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#109

Post by simondotau »

marcinzm wrote: post #98
simondotau wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Can you explain what you mean by that? Then more broadly, can you explain how the creation of more GPL-licensed source code can ever be a bad thing?

An extreme example since you asked a very absolute question: I sell software to the Chinese government to track down dissidents and kill them with drones. I release a lot of code under a GPL license and use the funds to promote OSS software. Most people wouldn't consider this a positive for the world even though more GPL software is created. Or in other words many people do not believe that "the ends justify the mean…

You described multiple distinct events. The killing of people was the bad thing. The releasing of code under the GPL is at most a neutral thing.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#110

Post by the_other »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that many designers and engineers loathe Usability and Accessibility people (like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman) Which is silly because good UX that works for people with disabilities or impairments also benefits fully able users in the vast majority of cases

In fact, accessibility is probably the last remaining hope of power users[0]. With general-audience software, the market doesn't care much about the minority that are the serious users, and it's hard to make a convincing argument to business people here. However, accessibility does have a strong enough ethical argument behind it, which is also increasingly being backed by regulations. Allowing accessibility tools to…

In web apps, you can short-circuit this “there’s no business case” nonsense a bit by building your components using the accessibility attributes as the hooks between HTML, JS & CSS. E.G. rather than adding classes for everything you want JS and CSS to act on, instead hook onto the attributes role, aria-*, hidden and so on. If you do it as habit, it takes only a little bit longer to think about or type than attaching a class name, but helps you use the browser’s built-in accessibility support “for free”. If you work this way, you don’t even need to tell management what you’re doing.

I accept that this is easier on smaller, or new projects.

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