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Audacity 3.4

audacityteam.org

31–40 of 122 posts

Re: Audacity 3.4

#31
post #22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they updated their privacy and data collection policy. That’s kinda the blessing and the curse of FOSS. You absolutely can fork the repo, remove the telemetry, and republish it as a new app. But fragmentation is confusing, requires a lot of maintenance, and really I’m not sure it was worth it. Those who are particularly conscious about the telemetry can block it with a single line in /etc/hosts.

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.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#32
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with wxwidgets now switching to gtk, as the latter is way more widely used, wxwidgets is native looking for each OS, gtk has its own appearance, both shall do fine.

Audacities OS UI theme is really bad on MacOS. I love audacity but it really could use a modern theme like Gtk 3.

just installed via brew to MacOS, looks great to me. I wish HN let me post a screenshot.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is that, never used it on Macos myself, but gtk/gtkmm does claim to have Macos support and I would not expect some X server got involved.

The contents are rendered through gtk/cairo which not only goes through https://www.xquartz.org/ but also doesn't use GPU rendering (it was experimental 3 years ago, maybe better now). The main issue seems to be that neither Inkscape nor gtk people have low level Darwin experts or time available to invest in debugging the whole rendering stack. See for example https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/1614 and al…

This is very insightful, thank you. This might make me switch back to wxWidgets in fact. Desktop GUI is new to me and I have been trying electronjs(too fat), wxwidgets, gtk, flutter, maybe even Kotlin, looks like I will stick to wxWidgets.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#34
post #17

> You can now change the duration of your audio clips without affecting their pitch non-destructively. Audacity 3.4 uses a new time stretching algorithm specifically made for music, which outperforms many of the commercially available options. Way to bury the lede! What's this magic algorithm being spoken of, how does it work so well? > A more detailed overview of these changes can be found in our changelog . The cha…

I just feel like, for just stretching stuff and staying in pitch, any off-the-shelf FFT-based method has near perfect results within a meaningful range anyway. It has felt like a solved problem for a while? What does the "high-quality" mean here?

Re: Audacity 3.4

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contents are rendered through gtk/cairo which not only goes through https://www.xquartz.org/ but also doesn't use GPU rendering (it was experimental 3 years ago, maybe better now). The main issue seems to be that neither Inkscape nor gtk people have low level Darwin experts or time available to invest in debugging the whole rendering stack. See for example https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/1614 and al…

This is very insightful, thank you. This might make me switch back to wxWidgets in fact. Desktop GUI is new to me and I have been trying electronjs(too fat), wxwidgets, gtk, flutter, maybe even Kotlin, looks like I will stick to wxWidgets.

Make sure it applies to your situation specifically though. I'm not sure if that's a generic gtk issue or gtk-as-inkscape-uses-it issue.

Also, if you want another one for your collection, I've been very happy with Avalonia for desktop UI (haven't done custom drawing in it though)

Re: Audacity 3.4

#36
post #17

> You can now change the duration of your audio clips without affecting their pitch non-destructively. Audacity 3.4 uses a new time stretching algorithm specifically made for music, which outperforms many of the commercially available options. Way to bury the lede! What's this magic algorithm being spoken of, how does it work so well? > A more detailed overview of these changes can be found in our changelog . The cha…

Is there a comparison of different algorithms and how they work anywhere? I only know of two, and I'd really like to understand them better.

The two I know of are Paulstretch (which is really only for super-duper-long stretching) and Lent 1989 ("An Efficient Method for Pitch Shifting Digital Sampled Sounds"), which can be thought of as a form of granular synthesis but isn't really what most people think of when they hear that term.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#37
post #17

> You can now change the duration of your audio clips without affecting their pitch non-destructively. Audacity 3.4 uses a new time stretching algorithm specifically made for music, which outperforms many of the commercially available options. Way to bury the lede! What's this magic algorithm being spoken of, how does it work so well? > A more detailed overview of these changes can be found in our changelog . The cha…

Is this different than paul stretching with infinite duration?

Re: Audacity 3.4

#38
post #26
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 developers who acquired Audacity had previously threatened to have someone deported to China and tortured over their API. https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/muse_group_deportatio...

I did some basic digging and this is at best a misrepresentation[1].

The original email appears to indicate they intended to contact CCP authorities. The inference I took is that they believed the developer was in China.

Later they stated that violation of law in Canada could result in revocation of visa.

So "threated to have someone deported" is maybe a stretch, "tortuted" is pretty untrue.

The github issue appears to show a pretty reasonable attempt by both parties to move forward.

1. https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu...

Re: Audacity 3.4

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very insightful, thank you. This might make me switch back to wxWidgets in fact. Desktop GUI is new to me and I have been trying electronjs(too fat), wxwidgets, gtk, flutter, maybe even Kotlin, looks like I will stick to wxWidgets.

Make sure it applies to your situation specifically though. I'm not sure if that's a generic gtk issue or gtk-as-inkscape-uses-it issue. Also, if you want another one for your collection, I've been very happy with Avalonia for desktop UI (haven't done custom drawing in it though)

know nothing about c# :(

Re: Audacity 3.4

#40
post #17

> You can now change the duration of your audio clips without affecting their pitch non-destructively. Audacity 3.4 uses a new time stretching algorithm specifically made for music, which outperforms many of the commercially available options. Way to bury the lede! What's this magic algorithm being spoken of, how does it work so well? > A more detailed overview of these changes can be found in our changelog . The cha…

Tangential to this, I've noticed significant differences in audio quality when listening to audiobooks at 2x speed on VLC vs MPV. In particular MPV doesn't seem as clipped.

A bit of an open ended question, but is there anything more I could do to process the audiobook to make it sound even better at 2x?

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