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Audacity 3.4

audacityteam.org

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Re: Audacity 3.4

#111

Post by okbrown »

skrebbel wrote: post #74
Slow_Hand wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious myself, so I downloaded Audacity and tried. It's a granular time-stretch algorithm. By the sound of the artifacts at extreme settings it's akin to the 'Complex Pro' algorithm in Ableton Live (if you have any reference to that) and seems to be equally effective at a wide variety of sources (percussion, vocals, full records). Is it better than most commercial offerings? Hard to say after a brief test, but…

What's the regular go-to tool for audio pros? Adobe Audition or something else? I'm from the age when Sound Forge was considered leading (and Audition, then named CoolEdit, was its cheapo shareware competitor) so I'm probably way behind the times.

It's still apps like Sound Forge, Wavelab etc. I use audacity mostly for the loopback feature to record audio from various "sources"

Though with this new update, I thought I could stop using Sound Forge but quickly realised it doesn't have a real time pitch control on play back (think the pitch control on a turntable) so I will be keeping with Sound Forge untill then.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#112

Post by djur »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #29
evgpbfhnr wrote: post #2

Speaking of which, how did that "audacity isn't FOSS" fuss end up? A quick search shows tenacity is still active ( https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity ) but I have no idea how much the projects kept interacting after the initial debate

I recently needed to do some sound editing, and I had a dreadful experience with Tenacity. Running on PopOS, I encountered many crashes doing simple manipulations. Even trying to scroll while playing audio ostensibly resulted in a crash. Small favor, the restore-unsaved-work functionality did save me several times. Eventually, I held my nose and ran Audacity in a VM, and not a single crash.

Why would you run Audacity in a VM?

Re: Audacity 3.4

#113

Post by djur »

Intralexical wrote: post #53
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, there are other options, but a VM is the only one in which I feel safe that I do not screw up the configuration somehow. Docker can punch through a firewall, what other “obvious” settings exist in whatever lockdown option I pick? Barring a VM escape exploit, I know that my private data is not getting exposed.

Ardour's pro-grade, isn't it? Maybe not as easy to start with as Audacity, but surely easier and more useful to set up than Audacity in a VM.

If you don't trust Audacity, why would you trust Ardour?

Re: Audacity 3.4

#114

Post by djur »

bscphil wrote: post #55
saint_yossarian wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like there's also a build flag to disable all networking, which the Debian package sets: https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/audacity/-/commit/1...

As does Arch Linux: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/au... Distributions and open source maintainers looking out for their users, once again.

The primary network activity Audacity does is checking for updates, which you don't want in a distro-packaged binary in any case. I don't know if it's "looking out for users".

Re: Audacity 3.4

#115

Post by djur »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #31
swyx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seriously, people who get outraged over telemetry should temper their anger. most of the time the telemetry isn't used to sell your data or something nefarious (its quite useless if you dont even have a login, like audacity does), its just being used to try to improve the product for you. i write this as someone who's been involved in one too many debates about the perils of introducing telemetry to a commercial open…

The problem is you never know what they will share. Today, they just want to track which buttons get clicked. Tomorrow, maybe some eager PM wants to upload all of my environment variables. If it can fully run locally on my machine, I do not want it sending anything external. Lastly, as an abused Firefox user, it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like.

The problem with this argument is that there's no reason to believe a slippery slope exists. It's just as easy to go from "no tracking" to "digital colonoscopy" as it is when your starting point is "anonymized crash reporting". Any new release of any software could start spying on you.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#116

Post by mlry »

didntcheck wrote: post #77
LWinterberg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's complete BS. Audacity never stopped being open source and currently has update checking and crash reporting - it does not have any telemetry.

And telemetry isn't even a bad thing. Firefox has had more extensive telemetry than Audacity for years. This idea that it's evil and nefarious to collect voluntary statistics on program usage to better target (limited) development resources is quite eye-rolling

How about calling it evil and nefarious to speak about voluntary statistics when it is not opt-in, but opt-out? There are users out there who will agree to anything. But I doubt those are the ones that really should direct the evolution of a piece of software. And almost no users will agree to telemetry when openly asked what we are talking about. And I have yet to be convinced that telemetry is actually as useful as proclaimed. I don't really see Firefox moving in a direction that enhances user experience based on gathered data. Windows, anyone?

Re: Audacity 3.4

#118

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

Aachen wrote: post #109
bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The library name links to a Microsoft repository. You link to the official audacity and chose to (incorrectly) describe it as ”a Microsoft repository” Why being dishonest?

If I say GitHub repository, does the sentence then make sense to you? I tend to forget that GH is Microsoft's similar to how people around here forget WhatsApp is Facebook or random brands are Nestlé, so I try to get in the habit of calling things by the parent brand to decrease the obfuscation Maybe I should simply have said git, though. Didn't think of that until now at the end of writing this reply. No dishonesty…

”a microsoft repository” implies that the audacity project is handled by microsoft, which false.

If you must state ownership you could have done so with something like ”a microsoft-hosted repository”.

Most of us have been around since before microsoft bought github.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#119

Post by saintmatthieu »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #31
swyx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seriously, people who get outraged over telemetry should temper their anger. most of the time the telemetry isn't used to sell your data or something nefarious (its quite useless if you dont even have a login, like audacity does), its just being used to try to improve the product for you. i write this as someone who's been involved in one too many debates about the perils of introducing telemetry to a commercial open…

The problem is you never know what they will share. Today, they just want to track which buttons get clicked. Tomorrow, maybe some eager PM wants to upload all of my environment variables. If it can fully run locally on my machine, I do not want it sending anything external. Lastly, as an abused Firefox user, it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like.

> it seems that telemetry is only ever used to justify removing features I like

If the removed features are only features you like, then they probably aren't doing things right... The one most relevant purpose for telemetry I see for Audacity is precisely preventing this from happening, meanwhile fostering a more vigorous growth of the repo by cutting off dead branches. Audacity is over 20 years of development of features, some of which we every now and again wonder if they're still used. Not knowing, we try our best maintaining these, which slows down Development, QA and Design in delivering features that are relevant now.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#120

Post by LWinterberg »

mlry wrote: post #116
didntcheck wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And telemetry isn't even a bad thing. Firefox has had more extensive telemetry than Audacity for years. This idea that it's evil and nefarious to collect voluntary statistics on program usage to better target (limited) development resources is quite eye-rolling

How about calling it evil and nefarious to speak about voluntary statistics when it is not opt-in, but opt-out? There are users out there who will agree to anything. But I doubt those are the ones that really should direct the evolution of a piece of software. And almost no users will agree to telemetry when openly asked what we are talking about. And I have yet to be convinced that telemetry is actually as useful as…

In the context of Audacity, telemetry already would have been useful: A previous version removed the cut/copy/paste buttons, thinking that people normally used ctrl+x/c/v. However, in practice this turned out to only be half-true: while cutting in the context of cut-and-paste may have been used with shortcuts, a fairly significant number of Audacity users actually used "the scissors" to cut (as in: delete) content and came to the forum to complain because their core workflow was broken.

This sort of situation is bad for everyone: People get their workflow broken, devs need to do work to remove and later reinstate a feature, and privacy-minded people who want to complain need to share name and email to sign up on a forum for an account. In addition, it is hard to gauge what significance the forum posts have: If 100 people are complaining, are they a vocal minority of the millions of users Audacity has, or are they representative of most people?

This is especially true considering Audacity is the sort of casual "useful toolbox USB stick" program for many people - they're not going to closely follow development and updates or participate in polls or surveys, simply because it's not a part of their life they care about that much. This situation is different for something like Blender in which the tool tends to be a major part of your hobby or job if you use it at all. Although, saying that: This is a hypothesis based on my perception which cannot be verified as neither Blender nor Audacity track this data.

With telemetry (which for Audacity would have been a "do you want telemetry yes/no"-type dialog on first launch) the question "does anyone actually use the cut/copy/paste buttons?" would have been answered with "actually, yes", things would have been done differently, nobody's workflows would have been broken, and privacy-minded folks would not have needed to put emails on a forum which may or may not get hacked in the future.

In some sense, even people who disable telemetry benefit from telemetry being an option - assuming that their needs are in aggregate otherwise similar to the average user.

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