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Audacity 3.4

audacityteam.org

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Re: Audacity 3.4

#61

Post by Slow_Hand »

Aachen wrote: 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 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 it's not bad!

I suspect it's plenty good for the needs of Audacity's audience, who are unlikely to be demanding audio pros. As an audio professional I would never use Audacity, but if you need a quick, free, and (relatively) simple option to time-stretch a file, then it should fit the bill.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#62

Post by Arnavion »

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

FWIW it was never an issue for Linux distribution packages of Audacity. It was behind a compile-time flag so distro build scripts could have been changed to disable the telemetry. In fact the flag was disabled by default, so distro build scripts didn't even need to change and would've continued producing telemetry-free binaries.

Only binaries from Audacity themselves had the telemetry, which (as usual) is why you should never use upstream binaries.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#63

Post by tofflos »

Feedback on release:

- Overall great.

- The tempo stretching example in the video was too subtle for me. I listened a few times and had trouble telling the difference.

- The documentation at https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html is still for 3.3 which is a bit frustrating when trying out new features. Also the link labeled Manual that is displayed in the splash screen 404s for me.

- It took a bit too long to scan my computer for plugins and at the end I was told some plugins were deemed incompatible but not why.

Suggestions on next steps:

- I want to download songs and map the tempo to the song. That way I can easily loop over few bars when practicing an instrument.

- Today I use Ableton for this which can automatically detect the tempo of a clip, and align bar and beat markers to the song, without stretching the audio. It also does a decent job of following tempo variations within a clip. This all started working well in version 11.3.2.

I tried to use Audacity for this and these were my impressions:

- Opus support makes it easy to work with material from Youtube.

- Adding clips to tracks obscures beat and bar markings making them difficult to align with transients.

- Having to generate a metronome track is a bit clunky.

- Stem separation would be a nice addition so that I could easily mute the instrument I'm playing.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#64

Post by eliasmacpherson »

crazygringo wrote: post #30

Have there been any improvements in noise reduction? That's what's always kept me from using Audacity in the past. I like the interface and operations and everything, but cleaning up audio (removing room tone mostly) has always been the first step in my workflow, and its built-in noise reduction has just been unusably terrible compared to basic commercial tools. Or is there a common plugin people use with it that I'v…

if you were on Windows you could possibly do something to get this into Audacity:

http://reaper.fm/reaplugs/

https://github.com/nbickford/REAPERDenoiser

Re: Audacity 3.4

#65

Post by Slow_Hand »

willis936 wrote: post #37
Aachen wrote: 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?

Yes. The Audacity algorithm is a granular time-stretch, whereas PaulStretch is an FFT Transform for time-stretching.

Depending on your needs, you'd want to favor one over the other. Granular stretches are far less CPU intensive and have significantly lower latency than an FFT Transform. The granular algorithm will likely have better transient fidelity at small time-stretch intervals (between 0.5x - 2x speeds), whereas FFTs tend to smear the transient information.

Where FFT transforms really excel is in maintaining or transforming formants and harmonic information. Especially at extreme pitch or time settings. Granular algorithms can only stretch so far before you hear the artifacts. FFTs are far more graceful for dramatic transforms.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#66

Post by radarsat1 »

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.

Sure, but it's not even enabled by default in the upstream repository. Maybe that's a result of all the fuss about it, but nonetheless..

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/6c2e8a2377542d6722...

Re: Audacity 3.4

#67

Post by westcoast49 »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #61
Aachen wrote: 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 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…

> better than most commercial offerings

The audacity!

Re: Audacity 3.4

#68

Post by vintermann »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #61
Aachen wrote: 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 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…

Do you really make enough from being an audio professional that price doesn't matter?

Whether you do or not, there are a hell of a lot of hawkers of software and "hardware" alike, who stand ready to sell their overpriced "professional" tools to people who fail to make it in the music industry (which is going to be most of them, regardless of tools or even skills). A high sticker price is a way to prove your commitment - to oneself, at least. The end market is less likely to care.

Re: Audacity 3.4

#69

Post by LWinterberg »

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

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

Re: Audacity 3.4

#70

Post by LWinterberg »

tofflos wrote: post #63

Feedback on release: - Overall great. - The tempo stretching example in the video was too subtle for me. I listened a few times and had trouble telling the difference. - The documentation at https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html is still for 3.3 which is a bit frustrating when trying out new features. Also the link labeled Manual that is displayed in the splash screen 404s for me. - It took a bit too long to sca…

> - The tempo stretching example in the video was too subtle for me. I listened a few times and had trouble telling the difference.

that's the point of it. Being able to make 124 bpm samples cooperate with 110bpm samples without anyone ever noticing that it had happened.

> - The documentation at https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html is still for 3.3 which is a bit frustrating when trying out new features. Also the link labeled Manual that is displayed in the splash screen 404s for me.

the manual job always takes forever to complete, but support.audacityteam.org is updated.

> - It took a bit too long to scan my computer for plugins and at the end I was told some plugins were deemed incompatible but not why.

It tries to load the relevant VSTs in a child process and if the VST crashes the child process it gets flagged as incompatible. Audio plugins are awful and nobody ever follows the spec.

All of the other things you mentioned are in various stages of being planned.

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