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Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

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Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#81

Post by ulnarkressty »

Tantacrul wrote: post #66
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…

(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 to see an expert long-form explaining how they take the interview results and convert them into actionable goals in order to improve the user experience.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#83

Post by matkoniecz »

meibo wrote: post #32
marcan_42 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

I was mentioning this last time MuseScore appeared on HN - their CEO gave some insight in the comments on how this came to be. Seems to boil down to "music publishing mafia didn't like it", which is understandable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825533

This does not excuse

> Otherwise, I will have to transfer information about you to lawyers who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content.

part

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

Especially given that person making threats appears to be from Russia and target in China.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#84

Post by frosted-flakes »

open-source-ux wrote: post #69
mxcrossb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the problem is that OSS developers hate any change that’s made to a UI because it breaks their workflow. As a result, a lot of OSS has old style interfaces, and it’s hard for UI designers to convince the others to make changes.

Related is this: sometimes you have been using a piece of software for such a long time you can no longer judge whether the user-interface (UI) is any good. You've simply mastered the steps (and keyboard shortcuts) needed to accomplish a task and it now feels "natural", no matter how clunky or clumsy the steps remain. And there's also a widespread belief among developers that making a task easier in the UI means "dum…

A good example is the UI of Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, which is not at all intuitive. I was incredibly confused when I first started using them, and it took me a long time to become proficient. But now I've mastered them, the absolute last thing I want is for them to do a UI overhaul.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#85

Post by endemic »

mxcrossb wrote: post #35
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.

IMO the problem is that OSS developers hate any change that’s made to a UI because it breaks their workflow. As a result, a lot of OSS has old style interfaces, and it’s hard for UI designers to convince the others to make changes.

What I find difficult is the lack of communication. Programming UI changes is hard work, and when a developer isn’t convinced of the benefit to users, it makes it seem like the change is being made for the ego of the UX designer.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#86

Post by tclancy »

VadimPR wrote: post #26
throw_m239339 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I think it’s a culture change on the developer side. I was exposed to UI UX about fifteen years ago and worked with a number of terrific designers who put users first. The problem is as devs the job can feel overwhelming enough and then when you get to a point you feel is done, now you have someone telling you you need to redo it. It’s an egoless thing one has to develop and we don’t necessarily encourage that. I think the number of people who get to Beginners Mind as devs is as much Survivorship Bias as anything else.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#87

Post by diydsp »

marcan_42 wrote: post #29
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 li…

musescore.com has some dark patterns in the their pricing, too. Just 2 weeks ago, when I couldn't find out how much it costs, I asked my friend circle. They pointed me to some indirect references to how much it costs, but it's not out there in front. You also have to make an account in order to see the price.

Plus musescore.com has numerous shenanigans with payment, ending subscriptions, etc [0]

It leads me to wonder, what is the other side of this deal? Will muscore.com repeat what they did with the free musescore software and utilize it to ensnare a large number of community resources? What kind of deal are the Audacity devs getting offered? I hope tantacrul doesn't become the face of a dumpsterfire.

[0] https://www.trustpilot.com/review/musescore.com

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#88

Post by ridaj »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #31
VadimPR wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you get UI/UX people in from?

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…

I would also recommend Emotional Design by the same author. It's a follow-up book that has been very useful for me to understand that great design isn't just usable and accessible, but should also be beautiful, and should respect that what people build using software are not just files on a storage system but often their most personally meaningful things.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#89

Post by mort96 »

open0 wrote: post #54
shawnz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 necessary, because the old ones don't look amazing. But you can make tasteful icons which are also colorful and recognizable.

(And I know you can switch icon themes, but when we're talking about UX, we're largely talking about the out-of-the-box experience. 99.9% of users are going to stick with the default icon pack.)

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#90

Post by bemmu »

Ecco wrote: post #16
jchw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MuseScore is also GPL, so I assume there is no intent to attempt to change the license. This probably is more about the organization, funding, direction, etc.

Yes, but concretely, what did they buy? And from whom?

Well, imagining it from the buyer's perspective, if I bought Audacity then now I can make changes to it and while there may be other forks, these changes will be likely be recognized as "the" Audacity.

So if for example I wanted to cross-promote my other products or add a "pro" paid version of some sort, I could do that, and those would end up in the main version most people are downloading.

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