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Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

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Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#21

Post by throw_m239339 »

wexq wrote: post #9
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.

OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. His twitter ( https://twitter.com/Tantacrul ) and youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/user/martinthekearykid ) are full of interesting tidbits, an you can tell he's passionate about things. Even if you don't do music/notation his video on Sibelius, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI , is ridiculously funny, but also on point.

> 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.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#22

Post by globular-toast »

rubin55 wrote: post #3

How does one aquire FOSS software?

You can buy the copyright from the copyright holder(s). That seems quite straightforward if the holder is a single entity, like with Qt, for example. If it's multiple entities, as with Audacity, then in theory it's no different, but practically speaking I'm not sure how they have done this.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#24

Post by shawnz »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #21
wexq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. His twitter ( https://twitter.com/Tantacrul ) and youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/user/martinthekearykid ) are full of interesting tidbits, an you can tell he's passionate about things. Even if you don't do music/notation his video on Sibelius, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI , is ridiculously funny, but also on point.

> 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.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#25

Post by formerly_proven »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #18
arbitrage wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beloved is a little too strong of word choice for me. The UI is garbage. The plugin architecture is rough. It's difficult to workflow -- no automation is really available. Audacity produces good results, at the cost of an insanely high requirement for patience and experience. What you are actually in love with is the creative process of editing and creating audio. As a project, audacity has languished for a long time…

Much agreed on the history of Audacity. It has so much capability, but it's high time we fixed UIs that inspire anger or still depend on Athena widgets.

Audacity uses wxWidgets (though almost everything of the primary UI is custom painted, so it doesn't really matter which toolkit is used).

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#26

Post by VadimPR »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #21
wexq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. His twitter ( https://twitter.com/Tantacrul ) and youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/user/martinthekearykid ) are full of interesting tidbits, an you can tell he's passionate about things. Even if you don't do music/notation his video on Sibelius, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI , is ridiculously funny, but also on point.

> 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.

Where do you get UI/UX people in from?

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#27

Post by javchz »

arbitrage wrote: post #10
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.

Beloved is a little too strong of word choice for me. The UI is garbage. The plugin architecture is rough. It's difficult to workflow -- no automation is really available. Audacity produces good results, at the cost of an insanely high requirement for patience and experience. What you are actually in love with is the creative process of editing and creating audio. As a project, audacity has languished for a long time…

The great about Audacity it's that it's a great DAW starter. You can record, edit, multitrack, mix and apply effects.

It's fast, out of the box, multiplatform... and I haven't used it in years, but that's mostly because Reaper it's too great, the only thing I miss it's audacity loading times.

Now I think Audacity has only a few bottlenecks, the main workflow it's not that broken.

If what they say it's accomplished and they prioritize VTS non-destructive effects, improve the Timeline management and other UX details. I could see Audacity present in the majority of home studios and the software behind a lot of professional works (not big studios, but enough for self publish). I now a couple of local bands that recorded their demo with audacity, a cheap interface and a sm57 mic.

...and if I can ask maybe add support for ASIO (something hard to happen becauses licences, but I can dream).

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#29

Post by marcan_42 »

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 license). None of the profits go to independent creators, only to a few major rights associations, regardless of who actually owns the music. They then tried to threaten folks who had written download tools with vague and ridiculous threats. [1]

It seems these days they support CC (finally...), but not any ad-hoc or third party licenses. So most of the music I'm interested in, which is legal to distribute sheet music of for free but not commercially (but under a non-CC license), is still paywalled in violation of its copyright.

MuseScore the software is fine, but the MuseScore.com fiasco has left a really bad taste in my mouth. I hope none of that nonsense bleeds over into the development teams of the actual OSS software, but absent any kind of apology or change of direction MuseScore.com, I'm scared.

[1] https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5

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