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Comment by foxfired | Hacker News Reader

A few months back I've downloaded the beta version and was kinda disappointed. I understand that switching to Qt will make future development much easier, but it wasn't addressing my main concern with Audacity.

When I decided to record an audio version of my book, I started with Audacity. But it quickly failed me when I started losing track of what files I was using, and if I deleted a file from the timeline, it was impossible to track what was what. All this because Audacity doesn't have a media manager. Instead, you have to open a folder on the side and manage media yourself. I've written a blog post about it, didn't get much traction. But as of a few days ago, one of the developers commented that a media me is "on our shortlist of new features to include".

I am really looking forward to version 4.0, I hope Audacity gets its Blender moment.

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Audacity is a linear audio editor and you sound like you were trying to use it as a non-linear DAW, which feature bloat and undo/redo sort of but not really lets you do. A media manager does not really help in this sort of editor, your timeline is not an arrangement of files as it is in a daw but the actual audio file you are arranging and changes are destructive. Linear editing is like working with tape, your changes are permanent, every change alters the medium (the destination audiofile held in memory in this case); non-linear is like a sampler on steroids and is how DAWs function, you arrange the samples (files) in time and then record them out to a file when things are how you want it.

Audacity is fine for quick editing and merging tracks together but it's not ideal for more professional applications like music and narration production. It certainly could be used for those things but you're going to be stumbling over a lot of obstacles that have already been solved. Obviously you don't need anything like Ableton but there are other FOSS digital audio workstations that offer exactly what you'd need for editing audiobook narration. You're trying to layout a novel with a text editor.

Linear vs non-linear is kind of hard to describe in the modern era, we aren't splicing tape anymore, the original audio is still safe on the disk unless you overwrite it. It's really just that Audacity doesn't give you the kinds of features that a true non-linear DAW has. There's no reason why it couldn't have those features, it's just not the focus of what Audacity needs to be (simple audio recording and editing).

Audacity is not about simple audio recording and editing, it is about linear editing and can be more suitable than a DAW when it comes to heavy and complicated editing but it requires a different work flow. DAW is designed for production, mixing, mastering, and when applied towards editing you can find yourself with a full hard drive in surprisingly little time because every edit means the DAW creates another audio file.

The DAW did not solve anything, it just choose a different set of problems which are less of an issue for the tasks the DAW is designed for but can be fairly irritating if the tool you need is a capable editor. Something like recording an audiobook can be done effectively and efficiently in either a DAW or an editor and I can make a case for either. In the case of an audiobook, my choice would be to assemble it in an editor and polish it off in a DAW.

> DAW is designed for production, mixing, mastering, and when applied towards editing you can find yourself with a full hard drive in surprisingly little time because every edit means the DAW creates another audio file.

This isn't how the vast majority of operations work in the two DAWs I'm the most familiar with (Ableton Live and Logic Pro) work, most actions are non-destructive and don't result in extra files on your computer (e.g., the original file is referenced, and edits are applied on top of that without modifying the underlying audio file [a la Lightroom for photos]). There are certainly situations where new audio files are written, but it's usually crystal clear when you're doing so.

For the record, I agree with your overall point. DAWs abstract away a lot of the details of the underlying audio files, and there's definitely space for tools like Audacity that are designed to edit audio files staying closer to their export formats. So just clarifying that I wouldn't phrase the downside of DAWs (or at least not all DAWs) around creating a bunch of extra files (although I'd be curious to hear which DAWs actually do work that way [i.e., create new audio files based on edits], just for my own learning).

Most of what a DAW does are not edits, they are operations applied to a stream; they only create new files when you do actual edits. They do make it clear when a new file is created. In my experience when ever you start trying to use a DAW like an editor you either end up creating lots of files or start creating more work for yourself than it would be in a proper editor with all of its shortcuts and conveniences aimed at editing. Admittedly, it has been awhile since I have used a DAW for anything but simple recording and mixing, so it is quite possible I am out of date on how they deal with this stuff.

I did a quick test in Ableton Live, and I was able to copy, paste, split, and re-arrange without creating any new files. But joining clips and reversing clips did create new files (I was surprised joining did so in particular, it somewhat makes sense for reverse).

If you split a few seconds off of a couple long files and then joined those two short clips, how would it read that join in a way safe for low latency realtime audio? Pretty sure that would get hairy no matter how you did it once load gets high or memory gets low, safest would be keep the join in RAM and that would not be an issue for something short but what if it is a long track pieced together from a dozen takes which were recorded at 192khz? What does Ableton do if you have loads of copy and pastes and splits from a single file that you then delete? do you loose all those copy and pastes? Creating files for each edit is simple and effective, doing it for joins is probably a decent middle ground but it would not surprise me if Ableton also does it for more complex edits.

Making a new file for a reverse makes sense, only simple/efficient way to do that without a copy is to dump it backwards into a buffer but that eats RAM. I have only started in on doing realtime audio programming but I think to just read the file backwards in realtime would require you to create a counter specific to each reverse? But I am not much of a programmer and just starting in on the audio stuff, I could be missing something obvious.

What's the difference between a joined clip and the two separate clips sitting right next to each other in the timeline besides how they're presented in the UI?

Also I can do all of these options in an NLE like Adobe Premiere with video (i.e., I can split, join, reverse, etc... without creating any new media files), why wouldn't a DAW work the same way?

Two separate clips will require extra operations during playback. A simple split or copy will also require extra operations but not as many. While these do not seem like a big deal, they add up and as load increases it means you are that much closer to dropouts with all those extra operations, especially when you are trying to keep latency low enough to record. I am not quite good enough to go much into these implementation details, I just recently got to the point of realizing how important these seemingly minor details matter when it comes to real time audio.

I don't know much about video but, video editing is simpler, you probably have a GPU to take a good chunk of the load off of the CPU and latency is less of an issue. How often do you do you have two dozen video tracks playing at once with each going through a dozen effects while trying to record a few more video tracks in real time all on your CPU?

I tried the test in Logic Pro, and Logic can split, join, reverse, all without creating any new files. It seems this varies per DAW.

> I don't know much about video but, video editing is simpler, you probably have a GPU to take a good chunk of the load off of the CPU and latency is less of an issue. How often do you do you have two dozen video tracks playing at once with each going through a dozen effects while trying to record a few more video tracks in real time all on your CPU?

I wouldn't characterize video in general this way (although NLEs maybe), e.g., a couple of dozen layers with effects in Adobe After Effects is common, and After Effects utilizes more CPU than GPU generally. After Effects can do all these operations without creating new files as well (although it has extremely aggressive caching both in RAM and on disk). (And real-time isn't as much a priority for video of course.)

I think this is partially an implementation detail, I think Ableton probably creates the extra files to help a bit with live performance since that's their focus. Whereas Logic Pro is a more generalist DAW. There are options to deliberately create new files, any time you want, in both (same with NLEs and After Effects).

Right, definitely implementation detail. In a DAW meant for the recording studio there is not much editing, you are dealing with full tracks for the most part and massive amounts of storage for all those takes; creating files is not much use here but in such a DAW you will hit the wall faster if you do a great deal of editing. In a DAW meant for production work it is fairly common to do a lot of editing and assembling tracks from many bits and pieces, creating files becomes more useful and gives you more headroom.

I was talking about NLEs, not video in general, just meant that I am not well versed in video in general, just dabble on occasion. After Effects and layering is quite different, probably can get away with 100ms of latency there without issue which gives a good deal of headroom compared to the ~5ms or less we need for a DAW.

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