Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM
It seems like the new UI look doesn't have light mode available and the only option to have it is to switch back to the old UI? That's a weird choice.
Audacity 4.0
211–220 of 278 posts
Re: Audacity 4.0
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you watch the admittedly long video from Tantacrul about what it took to get from 3.0 to 4.0 he talks about that. They had a lot of tech debt that made it impossible to update the audio engine. He talked about the new engine being the roadmap for 4.1.
I saw the Tantacrul video back when it was released. I think that's when I went ahead and bought myself a personal Reaper license. My thought then was: wtf are their priorities like if they'll focus on a complete overhaul of the admittedly basic but functional interface over broken recording and playback of audio?
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 with the audio engine and changing any of the audio back-end basically broke things downstream in unexpected places and couldn't be swapped without deep UI work anyway. 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? Let me repeat that to be clearer: The UI had to be changed internally in fundamental ways to do any work on the audio back-end and they chose to also uplift the design and UX while making it easier to replace the audio engine in a future commit.
Re: Audacity 4.0
#213Re: Audacity 4.0
#214Love what Audacity has become, especially the new UI that does not look like it was forced through some scrum pipeline
Eh? It looks exactly like it was put through a scrum pipeline.
I dunno if you're aware of the back story behind these UI design improvements but that's about as far from the truth as it's possible to get.
Re: Audacity 4.0
#215Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM
It seems like the new UI look doesn't have light mode available and the only option to have it is to switch back to the old UI? That's a weird choice.
They do appear to have a light mode, along with general UI customizability according to the homepage [1].
Re: Audacity 4.0
#216Re: Audacity 4.0
#217What possesses people to not include a screenshot on pages like this?
Re: Audacity 4.0
#218I've given up on Audacity because it hasn't kept up technically with how a typical home studio Linux system does audio, and looking at the change log it seems like they haven't addressed any of the problems I have with it in version 4. You'd think, well, it supports JACK, so you're gold on both JACK and Pipewire, but they only do this in an extremely annoying way. It doesn't create a persistent JACK client. Only when…
Wow. I ran into a subset of a few weeks back when all I was trying to do was record from a specific microphone connected to my laptop. I thought I just didn't know what I was doing! I gave up after 20 minutes of fiddling and used something else that saw the microphone immediately.
Re: Audacity 4.0
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was using wxWidgets, not GTK directly IIRC
Ah, the dream of "one UI toolkit to rule them all" was very much alive when wxWidgets got popular around the turn of the millennium
Back then it was wxWindows, but yes. Also I'm told it had a lot in common with MFC.
Re: Audacity 4.0
#220I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
Not trying to hate because a FOSS audio editor is great, but all of these UI improvements are carbon copies from conventional DAWs or video editors, invented 30 or so years ago. Like giving audio clips a header which lets you move them around, or letting you adjust the audio clip start/end by dragging the start/end of the clip, are not exactly revolutionary in 2026. Maybe Audacity will re-invent automation lanes next? I'm not against it. I don't see how any of this requires user studies and the framing as some kind of breakthrough though.