I’m now in charge of Audacity [video] | Hacker News Reader

I’m now in charge of Audacity [video]

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173 pointsmqus63 comments

Another step on the road to having more UX and UI designers get involved with Open Source. It's really exciting to see!

Especially happy to see Tantacrul delving into the history and mission of the project. It's one aspect that many UI/UX designers miss which causes massive amounts of wasted effort.

Agreed. UX designers are a rare breed in open source, and Tantacrul is a treasure - as is Audacity. I'm also hopeful of the approach. The video is already very respectful of the existing work, UI, and workflows, which is promising.

Not enough people appreciate how stable, reliable, and battle-tested Audacity is as an audio production tool. The fact that it's free software only magnifies its usefulness within the audio space.

In a former job capacity, I personally oversaw a group of >40,000 individuals all over the globe, who relied on Audacity to make a living. With Tantacrul on the UX side of things, my hope is that nothing too radical is done to negate the expectations of these users, as many of them are not tech-savvy and learning a new interface for them is basically the same as learning a new tool altogether.

Would you mind sharing what's the company/project? It seems very interesting.

In a past life I was the head of audio production for the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), Audible.com's online production service for independent authors and narrators. My job was to help ensure success for the at-home narrators who had DIY recording rigs setup at their home office.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing.

I do not think you will be seeing any sweeping revamp if that is what you're concerned about. Tantacrul is really focused on smoothing pain points and removing ambiguity. The changes we have seen from him in MuseScore so far have been small but welcome.

Audacity has a lot of low hanging fruits in the UX department. E.g. every single one of these "You have not selected anything to apply [feature X] to. Try pressing Ctrl+A to select everything and try again!" dialogs should just not exist (if nothing is selected, apply to all, done), or when exporting to a format which doesn't do separate tracks and there are multiple tracks in the same channel, Audacity just silently merges them (throwing away data). When recording while a track exists there's some way (outside of punch-and-roll, I think) to have it record into the same track again with no warning, throwing away data. Scrolling is vertical for some reason, even though horizontal scroll is the primary scrolling timelines.

It's great news! The little playful jab on the magnifying glasses suggests we could see some great UI/UX fixes.

While I am sure Tantacrul will do a great job, as seen by his interest in learning more about the history and existing user base of the software first, I do want to disagree in a more general way.

Personally I hate UI changes and I want Audacity to change as little as possible in that regard. It is not a tool that I use regularly so I want to be able to not use it for a year or two, get back to it and still find the same familiar interface.

That is not to say that there are not many sensible changes that could be and maybe should be made to Audacity. I am just saying that stability is far more valuable for me. I rather wish for more stability in software than better UI.

> Personally I hate UI changes and I want Audacity to change as little as possible in that regard. It is not a tool that I use regularly so I want to be able to not use it for a year or two, get back to it and still find the same familiar interface.

And here is the beauty of non-web based software, you can guarantee that you always will! Same executable on your computer represents the same program launched, forever. Things don't change under the hood without you saying "yes", so if you want the UI to remain the same forever, you're welcome to. If you later want to upgrade, you can, but you'll never be forced to.

Except that "just don't upgrade" is a very bad idea.

Why?

Security patches, for one thing, right?

Genuine question: what security vulnerabilities could Audacity have that would make not upgrading a risk?

Many, many, MANY audio players have had exploitable buffer overflows.

That would only work if I never wanted to change or update my system.

In practice, especially on Linux, binaries only work for specific distributions of specific major versions. It can be very difficult to get a binary to work a few years down the line.

Of course solutions like Appimage help quite a bit as software comes with most dependencies packaged inside but even then its not perfect. It will slow down the bit rot but not stop it.

It's pretty simple to build audacity. If you're never upgrading then that's fine.

In theory, flatpaks will have perfect forwards compatibility, unless some breaking changed occur without them supporting the old format in a legacy way, which seems unlikely.

In practice, on Windows, one can still use most things made 25 years ago. In actuality, I still use WinAmp 2.91 marked "Apr 16 2003" in the about screen. See also http://www.oldversion.com/ .

But Audacity right now does everything you need and you are not processing untrusted source files, so why would you ever need to update?

On the other hand, lots of people encounter Audacity maybe for the first time and the UI might be unappealing or confusing.

I think there is space for both you who wants an "eternal" tool and the new user who might want something more apporachable.

There are many reasons why one would like to update Audacity also if it already does everything one needs, for example increased robustness and speed in newer versions if they provide it, and also new effects that simplify existing workflows.

Also compatibility with future hardware, aka bitrot.

Having seen many of his videos, I agree with you. Not that I'm against it, but under tantacrul, Audacity will likely become nearly unrecognizable. Many of us have a huge investment in the present, imperfect system. We should admit upfront this is a fork, and a separate maintenance effort for Audacity classic will be a separate project.

The Audacity of past threads:

Audacity 3.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26496887 - March 2021 (219 comments)

Audacity 2.2.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15621681 - Nov 2017 (146 comments)

The Future of Audacity, Interview with the Team - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392035 - April 2015 (28 comments)

Removing background noise in Audacity by differencing stereo channels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6158058 - Aug 2013 (13 comments)

Audacity 2.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3714766 - March 2012 (63 comments)

Learning a new language with Audacity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2962284 - Sept 2011 (9 comments)

Audacity is a simple tool that does simple things quickly, efficiently, and for free. That's why it's popular. Generally I wince whenever people go monkeying around with tools like Audacity, because their instinct is to "improve" it by adding layers and layers of new features when simplicity was always the core appeal.

That said, Tantacrul seems to have his priorities straight. It sounds like he's going into this carefully and thoughtfully, which is a good sign. And Audacity does have one glaring problem I'll readily admit to: it's not simple ENOUGH. There's a lot of UI/UX etc that could be cleaned up, re-orged and better labelled so that people can actually find what they're looking for and use it more easily. As-is, the program can be a little thorny when you're first getting into it.

I've always found the Audacity UX to be cumbersome. I hope they make some big changes. I'm not super optimistic, though.

If your needs are simple, I find mhwaveedit[0] much more pleasant to use than Audacity. It also ships with a ton of high quality filters. Really nice piece of software.

0: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit

Definitely an instance of "to each their own" for me, starting a project in Audacity was refreshingly straightforward the first time I tried it. The non-destructive effect stacking mentioned in the video sounds pretty awesome.

The project you mentioned seems nice and clean, but looks like it's Linux only (specifically GTK2 only). For me that would limit the ability to share editing projects with others way too much, since so many are on Windows. Also, the 8 track limit might be frustrating for musicians.

I love Tantacrul, weird but welcome to see him on the front page.

I never encountered his chanel before so I'm also glad, that bit about 6 magnifying glasses alone made me instantly subscribe haha!

His video on Sibelius is highly recommended if you want more UX laughs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI

That may have been the fastest I ever hit Subscribe. Thanks for that!

ok that might just be the best video on all of youtube

This is what made me subscribe too. I'm glad to see others enjoy it - it's a very well done video.

I didn't know Audacity is an actual city, where Auda lives.

First thing on my wishlist would be something less weird than shift+function keys for zooming.

How we made it to 2021 without having per-application rebindable keys built in to our OSs is just one of many mysteries of how personal computing came to suck I guess.

My OS has that (KDE) sort of. Non-KDE apps don't use it because it's OS-dependent.

You'd need all platforms to have this and then a multiplatform abstraction layer to exist before it became useful... and by useful I mean: you can start rewriting every application.

Not really, you just need something like AutoHotKey that can intercept and re-write key events. Since the OS is responsible for delivering key events, the application's cooperation is not required.

If you ask me, multiplatform abstraction layers are part of the problem with this industry, not the solution.

That might work, but then the OS needs up-to-date profiles for each application (to know what to map events to), and changing the shortcut in the application's own settings would break everything (in addition to showing the wrong thing in the first place).

Isn't this kind of what Apple is trying to do with the TouchBar?

Shame that the TouchBar is hot garbage.

In the Gnome 2.x days, you could (in GTK apps) assign a custom keystroke to any item in any pull-down menu by hovering over the item and then pressing the keystroke you wanted to assign. It was the most simple, intuitive way to customize app keyboard shortcuts I've ever seen, and I still miss it.

> It was the most simple, intuitive way to customize app keyboard shortcuts I've ever seen

IFF you knew about it. Gnome X.X has always suffered from poor interface intuitivity, while simultaneously having some great UI/UX features.

OSX's Keyboard prefs lets you define custom menu shortcuts for any program. Sadly there's no global interface for stuff like "hold this to zoom" so you still have to deal with whatever the program's developer thought sounded good.

His Audacity has a bunch of features that aren't familiar to me, including a De-Esser and a De-Clicker. Are those plugins?

Yes, there are hilarious numbers of plugin audio filters, you probably just need to install the extras. I know on my system they got installed by default but I have seen them absent before on bare bones installs.

Those are generally for editing vocals. A de-esser is a narrow band compressor to used to soften the "s" in speech. De-clickers remove transient sounds, like the sound of your lips opening/closing between words.

Can you please fix Audacity 3.0 under Linux with HiDPI displays?

The interface is completely broken for me.

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/503#issuecomment...

I was distracted a bit by his screen capture. Is he... editing an audio file sample by sample? Is that a thing people do?

I assumed people worked from samples, recordings, and primitives like sine/square waves and noise, and applied filters...

In music production, mixers/producers will sometimes zoom down to sample-scale and draw out a click or a pop from a bad edit that wasn't properly smoothed. Otherwise, no. I wouldn't say it's common for audio editors to draw samples.

It's not a common operation, but this is a massively important feature to have. Occasionally I clean up audio that's in such horrible condition I have to edit individual samples because there are no plugins that can do it automatically. For example: a pop or skip on a vinyl record. Sometimes you have to remove those by hand.

Somewhat off-topic, but I like the idea of announcing a major change in a project like this through video. It really provides the context and some background of what’s going on and why the change is happening.

Granted, tentacrul seems like an established YouTuber, and this was probably the natural way for him to announce this, but I do hope more people/projects adopt this approach.

Producing a tolerable video is a lot of work. Many projects can't do that.

And yes, in this video it was nice to see the people, but just for information text is way better to scan over and alter refer to or quote.

I would just like to point out that the UI for Audacity Portable is somewhat better than the regular Audacity, mainly in terms of the menu structure and wording. If you like Audacity but find the menus awkward, try Audacity Portable.

I am very glad Tantacrul is now involved with Audacity. This is great news.

It's a great tool, though a feature I'm frequently missing is the ability to display a sample value in the original domain i.e. as int16.

I would like to say thank you to all the contributors of Audacity. Thanks to your work, we have a treasure like Audacity

MuseScore is such a great piece of free software, I assume this will be beneficial for Audacity!

I was introduced to Tantacrul via his video on MuseScore. I was thoroughly unimpressed by it and was taken aback by the things he chose to focus on and give priority to.

A lot of the video felt like it was missing the forest for the trees and felt like more like a person trying to say "Did you notice this? I did!" rather than focusing on the actual big picture.

At one point he says that software should try to build on familiarity and frameworks that the user would be used to and find intuitive. Later on, he completely misses how presets are represented and complains that it's unintuitive.

The amount of time he chose to spend on iconography was mind-boggling, and his specific comparison of of iconography to typography was tenuous at best.

Overall I feel that the lack of of FOSS UX devs is what Tantacrul is taking advantage of. His slick videos seem compelling and correct, but are extremely surface level.

The MuseScore video is part entertainment, part critique. Personally, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it so quickly. He's very knowledgable in the field of music notation software, and is in a smaller niche of having used several of them professionally (most people stick to one or two). In another video on Dorico [0], he did user testing. So he's not just pulling things out his ass.

It's easy to hate. MuseScore is better due to his involvement. The FOSS community should be more welcoming to UX devs in general, and especially who have a methodical approach and actually listen. Maybe wait and reserve judgement.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8

So, you have experience in UI/UX yourself then to say this authoritatively?

The iconography part is a bit long and excessive, but as an uninvested party, the rest of his MuseScore video feels like good user interface criticism. It may seem like a lot of little nitpicks, but “death by a thousand cuts” seems like the relevant phrase, and he clearly understands how someone would want to use the software, because he is part of the target audience (composers).

Great. Could you add support for big-endian systems, please?

> https://build.opensuse.org/package/live_build_log/multimedia...

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