Audacity 2.2.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

Audacity 2.2.0 Released

audacityteam.org

371 pointsconductor146 comments

I love seeing software that still has a "Screenshots" section of their website. It's looked the same for as long as I've been using computers to record audio, starting with my high school band's demo over 15 years ago.

I could probably make fun of Audacity for not keeping up with the times, but if you look at other DAWs you'll see none are exactly bastions of good interface design. I got a little more serious about my music last year and decided I wanted to invest in a nice DAW, but after demoing I few I felt completely unimpressed. They're nearly identical to how they were 15 years ago, other than my PC being much more powerful. I ended up just sticking with Reaper, and hoping something comes along someday to mix the industry up. Proprietary dongles and tiered versions of the exact same software with gimped features doesn't cut it for me.

I'm more likely to download your app if you have some informative screenshots on your webpage.

> but if you look at other DAWs you'll see none are exactly bastions of good interface design

What? Modern "good interface design" (at least by HN standards) has almost nothing to say about complicated 1000+ feature apps. (In fact every time I rant that modern design sucks and that apps need more features the first response I usually get back is, "but that's so much more testing! Do you know how many execution paths we'd have to manage???" Well, that is kind of the point)

Have you ever produced music with any of these tools? For one, their goals are different -- FLStudio, for example, tries to be "the fastest path from your brain to your speakers", and the interface seems as such and is loved for it. Ableton intentionally crams everything into one screen because it is used as a performance tool -- if you've seen any recent photos of Daft Punk et al performing, you'll see it running right there on a laptop, usually above the mixer or the CDJs. Cubase has kept an interface very similar to its original Atari 2600 (I think?) version, because people have been using that app for 30+ years now.

Any time I see new-school UI designers' take on audio apps I cannot help but cringe. They are completely misunderstanding and underestimating their audience -- audio is complicated and we need complex tools to do what we do.

"Cubase has kept an interface very similar to its original Atari 2600 (I think?) version"

Cubase on a 2600 would be something to see. Cubase was introduced for the Atari ST in the late 80s. The UI has changed quite a bit, but the basic UI principles of early MIDI sequencers have carried over into modern DAWs.

Edit: A screenshot: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OlspnqVcJho/maxresdefault.jpg

See also Deluxe Music in the Amiga 1200:

https://youtu.be/OwROU4UkE84?t=45s

I won a copy of Deluxe Music for Amiga in a music competition when I was a kid; I'd made the winning track in MED or OctaMED, and kept using MED/OctaMED even after winning Deluxe Music.

I found Deluxe Music cartoonish and not capable of doing what I wanted. I dismissed it almost immediately. It felt like wearing gloves to compose after coming from trackers, where you had tick-precision (this was sort of a weird combination of interrupts and the BPM of your song, I don't remember the details now) control over everything like volume, pitch, arpeggiation, the Paula filter, etc.

I think it's worth noting that Deluxe Music is distinctly not what modern DAWs look like, while Cubase kinda sorta is. Deluxe Music brought traditional music notation into the computer, which was great for folks who were comfortable with it, but you lose a lot of control and information visibility when you do that. And, of course, it requires your user to have some sort of formal music education.

There are still tools that'll work with traditional music notation, but very few people use them for composition. There's millions of copies of DAWs using a Cubase-ish sequencer-style interface in use every day.

Oh, man: MED and then OctaMED (when it eventually landed on a magazine cover CD) were my trackers of choice for creating music for the games I was always tinkering with back in the early 90s, and arguably the reason I got back into music production as hobby in the late noughties.

If you find yourself wanting to play with trackers today, Renoise is the modern spiritual successor of MED and ProTracker and the like, and it's really great, and is competitive with modern DAWs in that it supports VSTs and controllers and automation and such. SunVox is also super cool, but for different reasons...it's more of a minimalist tool.

Thanks for the recommendation - there's still something appealing to me about the tracker way of working (and it's only €68!).

Seconding this. Renoise is amazing. And extremely affordable compared to other DAWs.

I originally picked it because its demo version doesn't have any of the more extreme limitations that make it very hard to actually create something. Only WAV export is disabled, which is fairly easy to work around if you must. Buying the license is totally worth it though, because it's cheap and you get the ability to easily records part of a track to another sample/instrument, which is a great workflow. Being somewhat familiar with trackers was also a nice bonus, of course.

Atari ST... I stand corrected :)

It would be quite a feat to put Cubase on an Atari 2600, a machine with 128 bytes of RAM. Not kilobytes - bytes.

Logic Audio (I started at v5) remains the most complex UI I have ever had to learn. It makes perfect sense to me now, but I long thought it was designed by sadists. I just did t understand the why of it.

> Any time I see new-school UI designers' take on audio apps I cannot help but cringe. They are completely misunderstanding and underestimating their audience -- audio is complicated and we need complex tools to do what we do.

Absolutely. Also worth mentioning is that many of these tools borrow elements from physical recording studios. If you haven’t worked in a professionally wired studio, some of the abstractions seem dated and unnecessary. Replacing / reimagining them is not practical, as DAWs still need to run in these environments. But try explaining that to someone who is just starting out chopping loops in their bedroom.

Agreed, particularly about Logic... I learned that program last and so much of the UI seemed to get in my way when all I wanted was to quickly lay out something like track routing. FL has spoiled me :P

> If you haven’t worked in a professionally wired studio, some of the abstractions seem dated and unnecessary.

Do you have some examples of that?

> Logic’s UI makes perfect sense to me now

Can you elaborate on that? That UI still bothers me although I love Logic’s plugins.

How did you learn the UI? Just through trial and error? By reading the manual? Something else?

Just trial and error is enough. And it's not that different from most others DAWs anyway

Have you looked at Ardour [0] too? What's your view of its interface?

[0] https://ardour.org/

Its not a DAW its an audio editor than can do multi-track, so its kind of apples to oranges. Its a great tool for recording it even runs well on the pi3. Ardour is great but its too demanding for the pi, runs great on my t420.

I fully agree with the above. There's a truckload going on in all these interfaces.

The thing people don't like here, which is absolutely true, is that if you want to use FLStudio, or Ableton, or even Cubase, and think you're going to succeed just by opening up the app and clicking around, you're wrong. You actually do need to use the tutorials and read the manual. (It's exactly the same if you buy any kind of complex pro audio hardware as well, from synths to guitar modelling tools like the Kemper Profiler.)

In my experience the documentation for FLStudio and Live is great. Full on, stellar fantastic. And there are a million quick tutorials from all kinds of people on YouTube to help. You just have to be willing to learn and invest the time to get the results you want. These things are not intended to be the audio equivalent of Instagram: for that you should look elsewhere (I'm not sure where actually).

GarageBand?

Assuming that comment isn't simply trolling...

GarageBand is certainly powerful, especially given it's deliberate limitation, and both myself and friends have used it to great effect, but Ableton Live it is not. If you look at Logic - which GarageBand is really a cut down version of - you see a similar degree of complexity to that in other professional level DAWs.

Not everyone needs a professional level DAW, and even those who do wouldn't necessarily use one all the time: as I've said, I still use Audacity, and GarageBand on the iPad or iPhone is a super-handy tool.

The parent was commenting on people who ridiculously bleat on about the the UX of complex professional level audio tools, not suggesting there isn't a place for tools that are simpler.

I should have made myself clearer: I was not proposing GarageBand as an alternative to professional-grade DAWs, but rather as the "Instagram for music" GP refered to in its last sentence.

Fair shout, and my bad for misinterpreting. Thanks for the clarification.

This version has new themes. I'm happy to see an end to the weird fuzzy mushy looking buttons. I don't really like the other theme that I could find pictures of (Dark Audacity), but making it themeable is a big win. I might even tackle making a theme myself, as I use Audacity pretty regularly for the final mastering pass of tracks I make in FL Studio or Renoise or REAPER. It's a great tool but the UI has always been sad.

Have you tried bitwig? It's fairly new and seems to do alot of things right.

not op but thanks for the suggestion

It was created by a bunch of ex-Ableton engineers so it is heavily influenced by that.

For what I do (mostly, stereo recordings of a choral group in which I sing), Audacity does everything that I need.

While my digital recorder came with a copy of Cubase LE, I took one look at the EULA and the bullshit DRM, promptly installed Audacity, and never looked back.

To my surprise, the shareware contender GoldWave (which I used a lot in my youth, preferred it to Audacity) hasn't changed practically one bit either.

Just look at Ableton Live 10 which has just been announced. Granted, it is an evolution, not revolution, but that's what happens when the people who make software care about efficiency and familiarity (instead of novelty and trendiness).

As a music app developer myself, I can say that UI design for music software is a completely different beast than "general" UI design.

Huh, I could not disagree more. DAWs are some of the most well thought out, reliable software I use. For a relatively niche product it’s amazing to me that there are something like 10 very different but very high quality options to choose from.

And they have changed a lot in 15 years. Not that long ago you pretty much had to use hardware synths and samplers to create electronic music and DAWs were just used for recording or mixing tracks. Today you can create full tracks with just the included synths and samples, then you can play a live show straight from the same session, and there are tons of built in effects to get a great sounding mix. Plus details in the UI, routing tracks, editing audio and midi, beat detection of samples, etc are always improving with each release. I will grant you, a lot of the top companies (pro tools, logic, Cubase, ableton) were around in a similar form 15 years ago and some 25+ years ago, but that’s not totally crazy given how complex the software is.

As for something new coming along to mix it up, I’m curious what type of changes would meet that criteria? I’d say Ableton and more recently Bitwig (and I’m sure the argument could be made for many others that I’m less familiar with) have both done that.

Check out Helio Workstation (open source). It has quite an interesting UI:

https://helioworkstation.com/

>* I got a little more serious about my music last year and decided I wanted to invest in a nice DAW, but after demoing I few I felt completely unimpressed. They're nearly identical to how they were 15 years ago, other than my PC being much more powerful.*

That's not even remotely true. Except if you mean "they superficially look similar to what they did 15 years ago".

That's because their fundamental functions are of course still the same as 15 or 20 years ago: sequencing MIDI and audio. Same with NLE, what did you expect, some thought-to-song interface?

I wish there was a some sort of a Open Source UI squad that would just work towards making awesome UIs for projects like Audacity, GIMP etc. There are so many low hanging fruits here like - iconography, spacing, using the right widget controls etc. that would make a lot more people want to use (and hopefully support) such software.

+1 this, 1,000x this.

Building a solid design culture is extremely hard - in my experience having worked professionally as a designer and engineer, much more so than a solid engineering culture (which is already insanely hard). There’s a reason only a handful of organizations in the world succeed at both.

I spent time volunteering for Gnome many years ago (2.x days), and it was extremely hard there, even though it had a reputation for being one of the most designer friendly open source projects. It was a struggle to push for design considerations with obvious benefits such as accessibility - let alone anything remotely resembling aesthetics.

The issue with open source is that ultimately, the project maintainers tend to be programmers with programmers’ priorities and views on design.

Good design requires consistent, thoughtful sacrifice and compromise, and someone at the top to enforce it. If the open source UI squad makes recommendations that the Gimp maintainers choose to ignore, then what?

Perhaps having "skins" capabilities would allow the best of both worlds...though it might end up like WinAmp with thousands of unuseably designed yet popular skins.

I'm afraid it goes deeper than that.

For example, you could decide to move some functionality from a sidebar to a context menu. this implies reprogramming the interface very differently; a skin can't do that. This also implies prototyping a lot. So basically the designer and the coder have to sit together quite a lot, that's not easy when you communicate via internet.

(UI) Designers don't want to work for free. This is more or less the observation I made in regards for Open Source software.

Having some side projects or helping OSS is somewhat expected from a programmer. From other professions not so much.

I did some free UI design for a game I found on the Pygame site a while back. At the time I was gainfully employed as a graphic designer, UI designer, and illustrator. The artwork was gratefully received and I had a fun time working with the software developer. Here's what I think made it go well:

- High visibility: The game was featured in the website sidebar. So I thought it'd be neat to contribute.

- Easy as HTML: Extract game zip file, edit Python files in a text editor, plug in my own filenames instead of the default ones. Start game, see my graphics.

- Developer was very open and friendly. Just an IT guy with a hobby.

- I knew about the Pygame website already because I followed FOSS stuff.

I don't know how many UI designers are browsing sites like that, but my guess is not many. But imagine if they did: what are the chances their workflow would be as easy as it was for me? In a compiled language, forget it.

I remember a few years back when suddenly it seemed like everything was on GitHub. My UI designer peers _hated_ this and many still do. So it's far from inviting in many ways for a UI person, though I don't mean to suggest they couldn't hack it if they wanted to.

> ...suddenly it seemed like everything was on GitHub. My UI designer peers _hated_ this and many still do.

What about it do they hate? I ask as a non-designer, to whom their perspective may be foreign.

Github is a code management tool, so it isn’t too surprising that designers aren’t fond of it.

Imagine code diffs, but for visual designs instead. Showing you which palette colors have changed, which margins have been tweaked etc. - Github doesn’t do any of that.

How could it? Do you expect them to run some sort of headless Photoshop VM?

I don’t know, that wasn’t the question.

In any case, is it that insane to imagine a visual diff tool? Illustrator files are basically just SVG, it’s all very parseable.

Write one and become rich. There are tons of graphical tools that lack a proper diff. Just lock at all the CASE tools.

well, it's able to display 3d files and images, so why not add some viewers for diffs ?

https://github.com/makezonefablab/MakersBook01_MusicBox/comm...

There's a huge difference between displaying a simple, well documented open format and handling proprietary binary formats.

But there are plenty of libre software which are able to open a very large set of PSDs. Even if not everything was working perfectly, it would still be a good starting point.

https://gist.github.com/ocornut/52a4b9c679ed670851e7

Github diffs PNG and SVG images I believe.

In general one should not use PSD in an open source project, because it requires costly proprietary software. Also does not run on Linux

They would show up wanting to find a download, and GutHub's UI was not set up like a typical private software website with a big "Download" button or menu item. It was off to the side, and I believe it said "Clone or Download", and these people are thinking, "is this some insider speak--am I at the right site?" And if you were just downloading, pretty soon you got told that you were ripping yourself off because downloading was so '80s, just clone the repo... Anyway you get the idea. All of a sudden tons of helpful UI resources were intermeshed with this GitHub ecosphere instead of living elsewhere, like on a lovingly-designed personal website with a pleasant UI that had not been mingled with versioning software.

Well, most design people also have side projects, be it a Tumblr page or an endless supply of drawings that they just do to improve their drawing skills.

But that's different from helping an (OSS) application look good. For that, you have to make tons of mockups, iterate again and again, until you have something that looks good and consistent across the entire application. Ideally, you'd also want at least one other person to bounce ideas back and forth, and have an opinion about what you're doing.

This is real work, which requires a lot of commitment upfront. The equivalent of requiring a programmer to lay out the entire architecture before they write a single line of code. That's also something that mainly happens in a corporate environment, whereas for hobby projects it tends to lead to frustration.

I agree this is a big job. Overhauling an existing application means a ton of work for both the designer and the developer. However the primary goal of designers should be making users work effectively. Building something that also looks good is a secondary goal. Great designers achieve both goals. If skills or budget are not great, go for the primary.

In the case of Audacity, I remember that I have to google how to silence a selection every time I get back to it after a break of several months. I guess this means that the primary goal is somewhat missed.

There is plenty of work that can be done incrementally though. Contributing as a designer into an OSS project is no different in commitment than another programmer/translator/contributor would.

There's always a cost to contributing. The cost gets bigger as the project gets bigger. This is totally unsurprising.

This is why people contribute more to software they use. You don't generally jump ships and help random projects for the sake of it.

Just as some programmers can be good at marketing products, I see no reason why developers can't be decent UI designers.

You don't need experienced UI designers to fix these low hanging issues, yet.

Funnily enough, I'm in the process of assembling a team to do just this! As a way of giving back to the open source community (which has given my company a great deal over the years), I'll be asking all my devs to spend a paid week per year contributing UI improvements to open source software.

Good UI is overrated in utility apps. Audacity, for the people who use it, use it very frequently. It's a powerful tool with a specific purpose. The initial few minutes of confusing UI are trounced by the hundreds of hours people spend in the program after they have all the UI and keyboard shortcuts memorized. Could it be better? Yes. Should it be a priority? Nah.

What should the priority be?

Fixing bugs and adding important features.

If you're talking about tech folks, then maybe yes, but I see a lot of popular appeal for such tools comes from ease of use. My assumption is that a lot of designers would reject a tool like GIMP / Inkscape because it appears "clunky" and rather pick paid alternatives Sketch / Photoshop instead.

I think GIMP could have the best GUI in the world and still no designer would use it since it lacks non-destructive editing.

iconography, spacing, using the right widget controls etc.

I've used Audacity for simple stuff but for a long time. IMHO it's very convienent. I don't dispute it could be prettier, but usability is good.

I recently switched my workflow to all linux compatible free as in beer software. I like being able to produce music on pretty much any hardware no matter where I am.

I love audacity and want to say thanks to the team!

What other free-as-in-beer software do you use to produce music?

Not OP, but there's Ardour, Rosegarden, or Audacity

Ardour (https://ardour.org/) and LMMS (https://lmms.io/) are probably the two most popular open-source DAWs. I also really like MuseScore (https://musescore.org/) for composition.

also hydrogen is ok

All three of these are Free (as in freedom).

technically Ardour is free as in free speech, but not as in free beer. They do not have official binary downloads for free. If I remember correcyly its more involved than ./configure && make && make install Though Ubuntu Studio has a version ready to go.

Lots of software that's considered free-as-in-speech-and-beer doesn't have official binary downloads at all. Ardour additionally provides the option of paying to download an official binary. Building from source is pretty much the same as anything else, although there are quite a lot of dependencies. If you're used to installing from source there's no reason Ardour should give you any great difficulty (unless you're unlucky and your distro doesn't supply the required dependencies or something).

It is waf configure/build/install.

Ardour is also available as binary packages on every Linux distribution.

MuseScore is great, I have used it to produce lead sheets professionally on several occasions and it does not disappoint. I grew up on Sibelius but prefer MuseScore for simpler tasks. They have done a great job.

Hey,

I have a score for a choir in musescore and want to create practicing files. For example in the soprano file the soprano voice should be louder than the others. Do you know of an automated way to achieve this? Maybe via midi then ardour? I looked at some other tools like timidity but none seem to have the required api.

Thanks :-)

Though there's no built-in functionality in MuseScore to do this, you can write a plugin that controls the mix for each voice. See this forum topic, which is quite similar to what you're trying to do: https://musescore.org/en/node/56916

Not for producing as such but there's also Mixxx DJ software where you can write your own controls and effects in Javascript.

Have you used it? How does it compare to commercial DJ software? Iyho

Yes I use it regularly. It has more or less the same features as the commercial software. Where it falls down is with the quality of the audio effects which are nowhere near as good as the ones you find on Serato or Traktor, but they're getting better all the time. On the other hand, you can customize almost every aspect of Mixxx. I have an unconventional controller setup so created my own skin (XML and CSS) and MIDI controls (Javascript) and that has really helped my 'creativity'.

Compared to digital vinyl with Serato, I found Mixx to be laggy (and more importantly, lacking of a dedicated next/previous track keys) with a low-end Pioneer DDJ SB. Track controls are replaced with a "hot cue" function, which makes beatmatching without cuepoints unnecessarily cumbersome. Don't recall if the UI had a dedicated next/prev track button but remapping the control scheme meant diving into some javascript datastructure that I wasn't in the right mindset to do at the time. Really wanted to like Mixxx but I could not see how I could perform with it

I've been using Mixxx for years, but I've never tried Serato. I'm curious, since I can't imagine what the point of "next/previous" keys would be - what do you do with them? Next/previous relative to what, exactly?

I use the 'prev' key to fast-rewind to the beginning of a track, for really quick needle drops on a downbeat. I don't use a lot of cue points and usually find it easier to start my mixing into the feed from the first downbeat.

Workflow is: drop from beginning, play+tweak til roughly beatmatched, rewind to beginning and needle drop on first beat again, then begin fading into the mix

Ah, gotcha - I had been imagining you meant prev/next with respect to a playlist.

I think you can do that in Mixxx using the "cue" button. While playing, tapping "cue" will rewind to the beginning of the track and pause; pressing "cue" and holding it down will preview from the beginning. While previewing, you can press "play" before releasing "cue" in order to continue playing; otherwise, releasing "cue" will rewind to the beginning and pause.

So, you'd use a similar workflow: play from the beginning of the track and tweak until beatmatched, then press and hold "cue" to rewind to the beginning and start playing from the first beat. If it works, press "play", release "cue", and bring up the fader; if it didn't work, just release "cue" to rewind, then try again.

I tried to get that working with cue but the modailty of it would mess me up. I suspect with practice it'd be easier. Wish the 'set cue' and 'play cue' buttons were different though

Thanks though! I still like Mixx, no hate here. I just need to spend some more time with it

I used it semi-professionally (I was a paid DJ, but not as my primary source of income) for a couple years. It's solid. 2.0 brings it very comfortably into competition with the best proprietary software, IMHO. That's when it got timecoded vinyl support, good pitch shifting, and better beat-matching.

Pros are probably still mostly using Serato or Traktor, but I don't think it's necessary. I used Traktor for a while but like Mixxx better. It's very good software. It had a lot of shortcomings in the 1.x releases, including stability issues, but I would definitely trust it for pro work today.

Great input. Thx. I've done a lot of proper DJing in my past. At this point it would mostly be for fun. Ideally get a lounge / chill gig just playing good choons for mood with no concern for a dancefloor.

DJing is fun as hell but isn't a great job. I mostly did it for free for charities and stuff that I support, but that ended up getting people requesting I do it for real and the money was actually pretty good (I mean, $600 to spin records for a few hours is great, in my book, though moving a few hundred pounds of speakers and lights in and out was less fun).

I never minded setting up. It was breaking shit down at 2am or later, plus a drive home, that always drove me nuts.

But i always loved, and still do, finding good tunes and then curating a vibe and a night. That's a great feeling. Free drinks help as well ;)

I'll chime in: Thank you Audacity (-team) for always being there when I need you (aka consistent quality and maintenance).

I've used Audacity off and on for years. Love that it is still around and pretty much _just works_. It does just what I need, as infrequently as I need it, and doesn't require an idiotic (and steep) subscription fee to use (glaring at you Adobe CS).

Honestly, I couldn't disagree more. Audacity is one of the buggiest pieces of open source software I've used. Audio routinely gets corrupted or lost. Their "known issues" page is comically long, and little ever gets fixed.

I have a lot of love for them for making audio editing accessible to the masses, but I wish a team would clean the app up like the LibreOffice folks did to OpenOffice.

I hate to agree with you, but I do. Quite buggy.

They are pretty accepting of new patches, and the source is easily readable. Knock yourself out :)

Sure, but like, the licensing works well for me. :)

Also, I don't know who decided to put a "Find out about LibreOffice Vanilla..." banner in that damn app, which appears Every. Time. I. Open. The. App. now. They need to be taken out back and code-reviewed harshly. It's not like LibreOffice is without many horrendous flaws either.

Oh yeah, it did crash a lot and would get into weird states that would make it hard to recover. Oddly, commercial editing software, even late versions, also had weird corruption issues from time to time, usually when plugins are involved.

I switched to Audition, and while the last CS release was pretty buggy, the CC version has treated me well.

You have to be doing something wrong or have something wrong with your setups. I've literally never had that happen in light to heavy use across 5 installations.

It's not hard to find others with problems. Look at the McElroy podcast archive: they alone lost numerous episodes because Audacity just didn't record any audio. My podcasting friends have ended up with corrupt Audacity save files (sometimes after a crash, sometimes just because), requiring a painful recovery process involving stitching together hundreds of scratch files.

If it were just me, I'd agree with you. But it's so common that I don't consider it a viable way to edit audio.

Edit: in thinking about it, one of the friends I record with often actually records with both Audacity and another app, just because Audacity fails so often.

I know I've come across a debugging story that ultimately ended up with the author loading binary data into audacity and hearing/seeing a pattern.

Does anyone know what I mean, and has a link, since I can't seem to find it...?

This is the only reference I have to it https://imgur.com/7ZoTLX7

It’s fun loading images into Audacity. The audio effects look surprisingly like they sound.

cool! good to know.

Reference https://questionsomething.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/databendi...

There's some visualizing memory stuff in this bluray drive reversing

https://hackaday.com/2014/10/30/reverse-engineering-a-blu-ra...

It's pretty common to use Audacity as a (very crappy) oscilloscope to capture analog signals via a sound card, is that maybe what you're thinking?

Maybe Spectrograms?

i.e. Aphex Twin's Equation

More here: http://twistedsifter.com/2013/01/hidden-images-embedded-into...

Modern interface design is all smoke and mirrors, and not about empowering the user. Interfaces in the 90’s and 00’s were much more useful. Given a choice, most power users would downgrade back to more features if they had that option.

I am so glad for Audacity but the UI always feels more convoluted than it needs to be. I wish they would copy Sound Forge's controls

That's a thought! I think that Reaper is the one to beat these days though, is there an essay or review of Sound Forge which would capture (comprehensively) what is to love about it?

It'd be nice to decouple the UI from all the major open source sequencer and audio software, just leave some sort of pure data + Core Audio style innards and reconnect the UIs on top. I've taken a few cracks at this in private, but embarrassingly have a hard time getting much done on this particular project without anyone watching.

I am not at home with my audio software but, off the top of my head, zooming and navigating a waveform in Sound Forge is SUPER efficient and intuitive, as mouse-wheel zooms and middle-click scrolls, and click-drag to edit individual samples. You can quickly zoom into your work at a level of individual samples and them zoom out and see the whole waveform in only a few movements.

My other favorite features are how editing doesn't rely on "modes' like Audacity (I hate having to hit a button before I make a selection then another to do something else), and Sound Forge's selection logic itself:

- the playback cursor will intelligently snap and loop on your selections (or not, depending on how you set the toggle), -

- the editing scrolls to follow your cursor as you are zoomed in, but not if you're currently editing something. A lot of programs do this but I find their logic is terrible and I have to control automatic scrolling myself. This is very helpful for working on seamlessly looping material, as you can leave playback on loop and continue working at the very end of your selection without the UI losing your place

- load and save in native formats without having to use some proprietary intermediary format (AUP)

I'd love to help out with something like this! Do you have a public repo or something?

How is it convoluted? It's as simple as it can possibly be. There are play, stop, pause, and record buttons, and the waveforms go in the main area. Timeline tools are in a smaller section, there are effects in a drop down menu, and the options you'd expect are in the places you'd expect them. I don't see how it could possibly be any more straightforward unless it read your mind.

Still looks like crap on OSX and Windows due to using GTK. I wish projects with aspirations of being cross-platform would stop using that shitty library and switch to QT.

It looks like crap on Linux too, they deliberately chose a widget theme to make it look that way. This version at least includes revamped theme support, so maybe someone will give it a decent coat of paint.

Woah, this is still around? Years and years ago when I poorly attempted that "band" life. My friends and I would use this as our recording software and it was great. Glad to see them keep at it!

Whilst Ableton Live has long been my DAW of choice I've been using Audacity since around 2004 and still use it today. Mostly it's quick edits on game sound effects: changing sample rate, bit rate, topping and tailing, fading, exporting MP3s.

When I master tracks in Ableton I also still use Audacity to export an MP3 version (that's probably just force of habit though - I imagine there's a better way of doing that these days).

I realise I could automate the MP3 export from the command line but it's infrequent enough that using Audacity to do it, edit the tags, and suchlike is probably the easiest option.

Live is a great DAW, and I really enjoyed FLStudio back when I used to run Windows at home, but for quickly hacking around with raw audio it's pretty hard to beat Audacity. Great software, and good to see it still under active development.

I use both Live and Audacity, they are just not comparable. Audacity is an audio editor, not a DAW.

Ableton 10 now supports export to mp3

Exactly.

Download Audacity Windows Installer - 19.34 MB | version: 2.2.0 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity Windows Zip - 11.31 MB | version: 2.2.0 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity macOs DMG - 28.14 MB | version: 2.2.0 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity Linux source - 9.72 MB | version: 2.2.0 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity LADSPA plugins for Mac - zip - 2.74 MB | version: 0.4.15 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity LADSPA plugins for Windows - installer - 1.44 MB | version: 0.4.15 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity Mac OS X 2.1.1 - DMG (screen reader accessible) - 38.61 MB | version: 2.1.1 | SHA256 signature

Download Audacity Mac OS X 2.1.1 - ZIP (screen reader accessible) - 16.50 MB | version: 2.1.1 | SHA256 signature "

How can I trust the website to tell me the correct SHA256 signature?

Shouldn't this be linked to a repository, or ideally something my client can verify the commits are correct?

Well, for starters, the SHA256 signatures are on both the Audacity website and its FossHub page. You can check if both places match, which makes it less likely to be from an untrusted source. They even have a page explaining how to check the signature.

If you're on macOS, before mounting a disk image the system will verify its checksum. Additionally, the default security settings only allows applications from the app store and identified developers. You can use the codesign tool (codesign -dv --verbose /Applications/Audacity.app) to verify the code signature as well as display the signing identity. In this case, it's signed by Paul Licameli, which is the author of this blog post. With that said, it's not foolproof, as the TeamIdentifier is not publicly posted anywhere, someone could possibly create a Developer ID with his name.

Sadly, there no yet ready-to-use Audacity 2.2.0 packages[1] for most popular distributives or at least AppImage[2], that could be run without installing. Also, its look like all daily/nightly builds on Launchpad[3] and on Travis CI[4] failed...

[1] https://repology.org/metapackage/audacity/versions

[2] https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages/Audacity

[3] https://launchpad.net/~audacity-team/+archive/ubuntu/daily

[4] https://travis-ci.org/audacity/audacity

I recorded my first songs on audacity, I love this piece of software!

Back in my day, we had Windows Recorder and Cool Edit.

I don't think anyone used Windows Sound Recorder for anything serious. It had a built in maximum record length for starters (I think to prevent piracy?).

Sound Forge was my preferred editor for years before Audacity matured. Cool Edit was ok, but I seem to recall it had a bizarrely over-designed UI that made the thing feel more like a toy than a serious tool. Particularly when compared to the much older and more feature rich (at that time) Sound Forge. It took a while before Cool Edit really became competitive and by that point I was already using Audacity.

I do still miss some features of Sound Forge even now. Though I don't tend to do too much with audio editors these days compared to the stuff I was doing in the 90s and 00s.

> It had a built in maximum record length for starters (I think to prevent piracy?).

It was somewhat related to the memory the computer had. I think it tried to store audio all uncompressed in memory. At the very least it varied a lot between different machines. I remember trying it in a super low spec machine and it could record up to about 5s max.

Haha, Cool Edit... now, that's a name I haven't heard in forever. Cool Edit and Paint Shop Pro were like the highest end crackeable shareware I never had a use for, and yet for some reason were the first thing I'd install on every new Windows install.

Cool Edit is now Adobe Audition

TBH, Cool Edit was better. Audition is crass.

Back in my day we had SIDEdit. And you would solder one SID chip on top of the other piggy-back style to make sweet stereo music.

You never forget your first! SoundEdit16: https://www.file-extensions.org/imgs/app-picture/2247/sounde...

Can the link be changed to HTTPS? Unfortunately the site isn't doing it automatically, even though it does support HTTPS connections.

Strange that OGG/Opus has been omitted from yet another release. I don't mind using ffmpeg but it would be nice to export from the same interface.

Looks like still no native pulse audio support.. dang.

Scrolled quickly through the comments and I want to ask one question: How good is this tool compared to commercial software?

When I need 10s of tracks (multiple drum mics, bass, guitars, keyboards, vocal mics, effects, etc.), I prefer to use Cakewalk Sonar. I've also heard good things about Reaper which is pretty inexpensive.

I often end up using Audacity when I'm working on only one or very few tracks (e.g., a video voice over). It works quite nicely for basic edits, trimming, normalizing, etc. without as much clutter (tempo, time signatures, measures, etc.) as some of the more music-oriented packages. With the addition of MIDI tracks, it sounds like Audacity is moving more in that direction but we'll see.

At least a few versions ago it was okay for basic stuff but quite far behind feature-wise to commercial software, which benefit from more integration, more polished UX, and a large bundle of plugins.

Having said that a tool is a tool and in capable hands Audacity is as good a tool as anything.

Can you apply real-time effects to tracks in multi-track mode these days? A big limitation if you still can't.

Complete support for macOS Sierra after the follow up is already released.

MIDI support seems like feature bloat to me...

bt and hundreds of thousands of other musicians would disagree.

(Actually, let's hope that bt can afford something better than Audacity, but the point remains that MIDI is still a hugely popular protocol.)

It's not that. MIDI != PCM or any kind of audio data really

Midi looks like (imagine someone playing two notes: a C then a D):

C4 127 On C4 127 Off D4 127 On D4 127 Off

(not literally, but that is the essence of MIDI)

MIDI support means synthesizer support, which means VST support, which means now you need some sort of MIDI data editor, which means now you've got to work out all the weird timing shit with MIDI, and by this point you are better off with LMMS or FLStudio or Pro Tools or what-have-you. Use the tool most fit for purpose

I don't understand your point. Of course MIDI is a popular protocol, I'm just saying that a basic multitrack audio editor doesn't need midi support.

Kind of depends to what extent MIDI is supported. Many instruments output MIDI. If they're slowly adding MIDI playback support, they may begin adding MIDI recording support.

Audacity is for audio data. If you want MIDI use a DAW

>MIDI support seems like feature bloat to me...

Totally agree, but you know how it is. I really have always seen Audacity as a swiss army knife for PCM audio files, but I am always surprised to see what people do with swiss army knives.

True. I guess it's like Photoshop incorporating basic 3D and video editing features. It will never be a tool for serious practitioners, but if you only need to do something simple, it's nice when to have it within your "comfort zone" software.

Full support for 10.12

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