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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

Really appreciate the minimalism and simplicity (it's so rare in this industry!) and though obviously this app misses a lot of important sound editing features, I think it's a great start and the basis for something really cool. If I knew Rust I'd have offered myself as a contributor!

Features that I think are critical for striking the minimalism/utility balance for podcast editing:

- Enveloping per clip, i.e. fade in - fade out

- Support AU plugins (at least the system ones) - this alone will add EQ, compression and other effects, so quite important

- Ducking / side chain

- Option to embed all imported audios so that I can move my projects around

- Import a video file but use only the audio track

- Put time markers and name them

- Go to time or marker

- Loop between two markers

- iPad version?

These are just off the top of my head.

Kudos to you guys and good luck with the project!

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Thank you very much for the awesome feedback. The whole team is overjoyed. It gave us direction. The good news is that it pretty much matches our roadmap, and a lot of the features are already on the way. Again, we greatly appreciate your contribution.

The video one is something I use regularly with audacity so replacing it would be great for me (I record with OBS then drag it in to extract the audio because OBS has a great built in audio filter).

I did a podcast [1] and edited it myself, at first with Garage Band and then with Audacity. I used Audacity's package of audio processing. After learning the hot keys, I got reasonably proficient with it.

I'm not doing it anymore, but I'd be curious what suggestions you'd have.

(I have no idea what "ducking / side chain" means.)

[1] https://operationcode.org/podcast

Ducking is just reducing the channel volume dynamically. For example when someone isn't speaking.

A Side Chain controls some effect on one channel based on the signal from a separate channel. Such as "ducking" background music when someone is talking.

Ducking specifically refers to lowering the volume of one track based on peak levels in another track. One track "ducks" under the other. It's related to a side chain input on a compressor.

Dynamically lowering a quiet signal is done by an "expander", or a "gate" if it's lowered to zero.

Listened for a few minutes: I'd tweak the EQ so that voices sound more pleasant. In fact the remote voice (is it Zoom or something similar?) sounds awful to be honest, but that's the shortcoming of this type of recordings. So you need to apply a different EQ to the remote voice: reduce the highs and slightly boost the mids/lows, but it may end up being tricker than that.

Ducking in general is an effect used a lot on radio: you have a background music that automatically "ducks" when there's a voice over it. In other words, background music gives way to the voice.

Thanks. It was Skype, actually.

Fades are probably the most important, imo.

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