Audacity Aquired by Muse Group • Hacker News Board

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#171

Post by dang » Sat, May 01, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #4

Tantacrul who has been working with Muse Score for a while now to improve their UX will also be working on Audacity. They also plan to hire some full time devs. Source: https://youtu.be/RMWNvwLiXIQ Well worth watching his other videos too, even if you don’t use musical notation software. Funny and insightful commentary on software usability in general.

Discussed here yesterday:

I’m now in charge of Audacity [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26995610 - April 2021 (59 comments)

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#172

Post by exikyut » Sat, May 01, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

ulnarkressty wrote: post #81

Tantacrul wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Tantacrul Here) It's true that there often exists a clash between designers and those who champion accessibility standards. IMO, this is normally because the designer in question hasn't enough experience working on software. Speaking for myself? I designed the accessibility features in Paint 3D while at Microsoft. I was in charge of accessibility of another Microsoft Studio that worked on Hololens software. For Muse…

Big fan of your channel. You mention in the video that the next steps will involve interviewing users and developers to find out more about the software usability and potential issues / fixes. Could you make this whole process and the results public, such that other OSS can benefit from this kind of usability analysis? There are indeed many resources out there about this sort of process, but I think it would be great…

I'd add to this the thought of supporting a dumping-ground approach where people can throw suggestions, rants, complaints etc "over the wall" into a giant wiki/knowledgebase or bug tracker type environment that accepts OC submissions or just links to external discussions or sources of insight.

Hmm. Now I'm wondering whether such a thing should be run for a finite period, or left open to track improvement over time. Perhaps the system could be cyclic, with "calls for feedback" that would require re-submission into each cycle. This would have the advantage of effectively auto-closing all unfinished work after feedback invitations, but the disadvantage of frustrating repeat submitters of issues that generally don't get prioritized. ...You know what, there are probably good established ways of doing this, Microsoft probably knows this stuff backwards, and the Blender foundation seem to have a good feedback thing going so they probably know a thing or two as well.

Regardless of how it's done, spreading the fact that it is being done far and wide is IMO crucial (eg, getting this onto as many OSS/tech news sites as possible) - and I also think that the _worse_ the signal/noise ratio, the better, as I reckon this would be a good indicator that the long tail of the interesting really-edge cases are effectively being captured!

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#173

Post by mackrevinack » Sat, May 01, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #89

open0 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the UI of recent versions of GIMP to be very nice for the simple image editing / processing that I do.

One thing I don't understand is the move to monochrome icons. I'm really bloody good at recognizing shape+color combinations; the old icons were ugly, but I was able to find the tool I wanted in an instant. After the redesign of the icon pack, I always find myself slowly iterating through every icon in the toolbox to try to find the particular abstract monochrome shape I want. I think a redesign of the icons was nece…

i think it would help if they were mostly a vertical list as well. the way they are now you are having to scan left to right but also moving downward as well. even 2 side by side like photoshop does is better since you can mostly just scan downwards

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#174

Post by marcinzm » Sat, May 01, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #109

marcinzm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are not distinct, stopping the former would also stop the latter, as such they are linked.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#175

Post by zxzax » Sat, May 01, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

ratww wrote: post #165

zxzax wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding that Github also operates in China and has to follow Chinese law, so that Chinese citizens are allowed to use it. Maybe you can advise on Chinese law? I don't see why it's not right to get the police involved if it turns out to be a criminal matter in China. (Not saying it is, I don't know)

DMCA absolutely does apply here, as Github is an American company and has to follow it to keep its safe harbour status. There's also no indication that Xmader is a Chinese citizen. The Anti-CPP message on his profile could also mean he's from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or anywhere in the world. The person making the threat seems to be Russian and MuseScore seems to be registered in Belgium. Even if China could be involved, i…

Maybe the company has more information than you do, we don't know that. I certainly hope anyone in open source feels safe to call the police when a criminal violation is happening, regardless of what it is. Again we can debate individual laws and individual enforcement actions, but comparing any laws or police anywhere to the mafia is nonsensical. Let's focus on the facts.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#176

Post by mackrevinack » Sat, May 01, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

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…

yea when i was using windows a few years back i got some great mileage out of autohotkey + microsoft's accessibility access. (acc.ahk is the script someone make that interfaces with it if anyone is interested)

one good example was being able to control spotify. it doesn't work with the current redesign i don't think, but i used to be able to heart a song, show the current track name and artist in a tooltip, or list all the songs in your friends tab. lots of handy stuff like that and it all worked even when the spotify window was in the background

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#177

Post by DistressedDrone » Sat, May 01, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #159

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.

Possibly relevant, MuseScore has a CLA requiring that all code contributors grant MuseScore the right to use the code in proprietary software. Audacity doesn't have such a clause and I don't know if they'll be able to get past contributors to sign such an agreement.

All 126 of them? Doubtful.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#178

Post by ratww » Sat, May 01, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

zxzax wrote: post #175

ratww wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DMCA absolutely does apply here, as Github is an American company and has to follow it to keep its safe harbour status. There's also no indication that Xmader is a Chinese citizen. The Anti-CPP message on his profile could also mean he's from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or anywhere in the world. The person making the threat seems to be Russian and MuseScore seems to be registered in Belgium. Even if China could be involved, i…

Maybe the company has more information than you do, we don't know that. I certainly hope anyone in open source feels safe to call the police when a criminal violation is happening, regardless of what it is. Again we can debate individual laws and individual enforcement actions, but comparing any laws or police anywhere to the mafia is nonsensical. Let's focus on the facts.

As explained, there is no violation here, since the API was being used as intended.

Also, considering the owner of the repository considers the Chinese state a dictatorship, it's pretty fair to assume "calling the Chinese police on him" doesn't mean anywhere near the same as it means calling the police in Europe or America. This is clearly the worst kind of threat you can make to this developer.

You seem to be giving all the possible benefit of the doubt to the company while giving less than none to the repository owner, even when they provided information about how what they're doing is not breaking the law, and provided a proper way to solve the issue, DMCA. At the same time, the company hasn't provided much.

I don't see why anyone should assume that the company knows anything more than that but is still resorting to threats instead of solving this the easy way.

The accusations don't have a leg to stand on, otherwise a simple DMCA would have solved the issue, period.

EDIT: Also, I don't see how this conversation can continue. If you don't see a problem with calling the CCP police on someone whose only personal information we know is that he's anti-CCP, then I don't think we have enough ethical common ground to even continue this discussion.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#179

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sat, May 01, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

JoeDaDude wrote: post #170

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn. That's what I did. The issue is that many designers and engineers loathe Usability and Accessibility people (like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman). For me, it all started with Don Norman's excellent book The Design of Everyday Things [0] (nee The Psychology of Everyday Things ). Reading that book changed the way that I view the world. I can't walk through a door, anymore, without evaluating its affordances and us…

For people unfamiliar, this video is a perfect intro to Don Norman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY96hTb8WgI

Thanks so much! That's great.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#180

Post by highspeedbus » Sat, May 01, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

Audacity lacks very few features IMO. Maybe a revamp on broken plugins and suport to drum sequencing. More than that will force the daw to change UI paradigm, a thing that will hurt badly in usability. The big reason Audacity is so successful is how easy it is to beginners to use.