The Future of Audacity, Interview with the Team | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Audacity, Interview with the Team

libregraphicsworld.org

72 pointsbaldfat28 comments

Former sound engineer and small record label owner.

I use Audacity for any single audio file edit I need to make (I don't do that much anymore a video project here or help a friend there). I prefer Audacity to other programs (WaveLabs and Audition) and their crazy proprietary formats and copy protection. (Wavelab uses a USB key that cost $30 so you have the right to use the software you bought or to demo anything they have).

There last release is getting HUGE with real time previews of effects and spectral views. It really has everything a person needs for cleaning and preparing audio for video projects and single track projects. Really glad to see this to continue.

The new noise reducer is also being improved greatly.

I would love to see some of that functionality to go into Blender, because that is a major cross-platform media workhorse already. The sequence editor is already very usable, but could use more audio-related features.

For me that would be useful since I normally never record anything for pure audio, but rather for Youtube videos. Others may appreciate the 3D Audio/animation functions already in Blender, with which you can design stereo or surround sound.

Wow, I got a shout-out in this!

"Adding real-time effects dock and automation would involve a major rewrite of the audio engine (not to mention redesigning the UI), something like what Joshua Haberman started years ago with the Mezzo project, right?"

Indeed, Mezzo was my effort at creating a really clean API between the audio engine and UI. I'm amazed that the interviewer knew about it; I didn't get far enough to actually merge it into the main tree, and this must have been 10 years ago. (EDIT: I missed that the interviewer was Alexandre Prokoudine, a member of the Audacity team from 2002-2012!)

Hacking on Audacity was how I spent a lot of my time in college (2000-2004). I was incredibly fortunate to find it and meet Dominic Mazzoni as early as I did. I had no idea the project would make it so big. When I found Audacity it was pretty much just Dominic hacking on it, and it had few users. I made a Debian package for it and Dominic asked if I was interested in helping out on the coding too.

One of the coolest experiences for me was when we had an Audacity hackathon in 2005 or so. Monty (of Xiph fame) was really into Audacity at the time, and I picked him up at the airport and took him to Matt Brubeck's place (mbrubeck here on HN) in Seattle. We met up with Dominic and Matt and a guy from Germany whose name I can't remember.

One funny anecdote. Audacity uses 3-space indents, which is incredibly unusual. Almost every other project does 2 or 4 spaces. Matt tells me (I don't actually remember this myself) that this was because Dominic and I had a disagreement over whether to use 2 or 4. We compromised on 3. I honestly can't even remember what side of that disagreement I would have been on. :)

> and a guy from Germany whose name I can't remember

It was Markus Meyer :)

I guess I should say something positive about Audacity, but... in terms of overall user experience it is so typical for open/free applications to look and feel just horrible, especially on the Mac. (Inkscape also comes to mind.) Every time I need to do something in Audacity I catch myself thinking, I should do my job as quick as possible and close the hideous thing.

Of course you will say but it does the job, and as a free app it's pretty unique. Oh and there are these people who work on it voluntarily, they are not paid for it! That's okay, I contributed to open source myself and I think I know what it feels like to be criticized for not doing enough for your project or being too slow.

But I have just one question for the Audacity team and all those who work on some significant open source GUI apps: why isn't the user experience your top priority in the first place?

Possibly because those guys are just scratching their itch and making what they need with as minimal effort as possible. I know, because I have been there with open source project of mine (of 4 people on the team, 3 were only focused on getting the features out and only one cared about UX and it was an uphill struggle for him to convince us to rewrite anything).

This is especially evident when you have no competition, no other open source project that solves the same problem. If you compare Audacity to other open source audio editors, you would actually appreciate that UX is functional and it's easy to understand what you are doing with it.

I would also encourage the design team to keep in mind what their users actually use Audacity for. I'm only talking Anecdotally here, based on my own experience, but I would guess that a large number of users use Audacity for it's dead-simple audio capabilities, especially the ability to record sound from an internal sound source (ie; recoding the sound coming our of your speakers). Essentially, I believe many people use Audacity as a modern-day tape-recorder. For this, Audacity works amazingly well. Throw in the ability to trim the sound recording down and some very simple effects such as Amplify, Fade In, Fade Out, and you've got a very good, simple piece of software.

I may be wrong, but if they pile in more effects and 'advanced' functionality, like any form of batch scripting or API integration. They're going to bloat the software unnecessarily at the expense of the average Joe. That's going to make the UI situation even worse.

Perhaps the time has come for Audacity to offer a basic version, with limited effects, and a 'Pro' version (possibly paid for?) that can cater to the advanced user who wants more effects and automation options and won't feel alienated by a cluttered, technical UI.

Audacity already has configurable batch processsing :)

The CNET demo doesn't look that bad, though.

> especially on the Mac.

I would say this is also because Apple is perceived as quite hostile to open source development[0], so things in OS X land do not get the same level of attention the get on Linux and Windows.

It used to be the same with Windows, but I think things has gotten a bit better there.

[0] For instance, having to pay 100$/year to ship your free, open source software to users is bound to push developers away...

From my experience, the problem with open source projects and Mac is that many developers who contribute to open source run Linux and possibly Windows, but do not have access to expensive Apple hardware. So they cannot test on Mac and have no clue that UX is sub-par.

Mac ports are usually done one-off by contributors who are not core developers and cannot do bigger modifications to the code. They just tweak things until it works.

Ditto. Windows and Mac ports are commonly done by users who went out of comfort zone, rather than by developers.

Mac is a commercial minority platform. Linux may be a minority platform on the Desktop, but gets much more attention from open source developers due to it being, well, open source. You just can't expect as many open source developers to care about a platform they have zero control over and is not as popular as Windows.

I am not a Mac user, so cannot tell whether it's really "especially on the Mac", but I totally agree that most FLOSS with GUI has bad look and often bad UX too. It's easier to find well-thought-out polished CLI/TUI tools than GUI ones (at least on Linux). And no, making terminal apps is not always easier than windowed ones.

Why open source GUIs are bad or inferior to TUIs? I think it's a good question and I dare to say it's definitely not the lack of skills within open source community. Maybe it's mindset-related?

I noticed that the most activity in open source is backend-related, if you know what I mean. People solving "real problems" in kernels, servers, daemons, agents and what not, may see graphical frontends as not important, often bringing additional complexity possibly not worth the trouble.

I could call myself a backend guy too and I think I like working on backends more than frontends, especially GUI frontends (well, I haven't touched GUI frontend matters for some time already, at least any sane one). I believe (maybe I'm wrong?) I am able to do some decent GUI, but somehow I never do them nor really need to do them.

I very much appreciate lot of open source work out there. I find it truly amazing how people find time, energy and motivation to work on something pro publico bono in their spare time. I like the idea and want to be more open-sourcy myself (meant as contributing to open source), but I always struggle to squeeze time and/or energy after work to really do it. (When I am even successful in managing to do OS activities, I don't have much time, so I fiddle then more with my old pet projects covered in dust than anything else, because becoming productive in other software needs much more time. Well, I do some bug reports or send fixes sometimes, but it's not more than a few up to several in a year.)

At the same time I always think and tell others, that open source shouldn't use some special standards, just because people working on it do it voluntarily and are not paid for. We should always aim for the best possible, not mostly working/ok-ish things. Telling devs that UI/UX of their project sucks for instance, doesn't mean we diss these developers. As a developer you should never take critique of the projects you're involved in personally. And constructive critique is always great way to improve our own views, because we're all biased, especially the creators of their own child projects. So while telling that UI sucks may not be constructive, following it with list of problems it has, becomes constructive. There are also these rare cases, when we feel that something is clunky and out of place, but we cannot pinpoint what exactly is wrong here...

OTOH users do not always understand that GUI is usually tip of the iceberg, and even if the tip is massive in some apps, it's still connected to stuff under the hood, and some refactorization may be needed to be able to present decent and responsive GUI that would replace the one previously available. We may try to criticize that devs didn't do their job properly if refactoring is needed for "tiny" GUI improvements and we may be right to some extent, but it's impossible to thought-out everything beforehand.

Last note regarding special standard. In fact many open source backend stuff out there is better than proprietary ones, so this special standard I mentioned before can be also meant positively. But it's also true that many of such successful open source projects do have paid developers after all.

EDIT: typos

Please bear in mind that making things work like the Mac is a matter of taste and not everyone prefers it.

I think he meant that Mac port of the application should look and behave like other Mac apps (following the system conventions and GUI guidelines), not that you should force Mac conventions everywhere.

I guess there's two levels of porting programs:

1. make it compile and run

2. change the UI and behavior to be in line with the system conventions

Most OSS programs which are not developed primarily on Mac only do 1.

Give me an example for a nice looking OS X audio editor in comparison? I find Pro-Tools (Not a Editor but a Digital Audio Workstation DAW) to be extremely ugly. https://www.avid.com/US/products/pro-tools-software the Open Source Audor is fairly compariable in terms of UI aka hideous http://ardour.org

Waveform editors and video editors really don't need to be pretty and can easily be DEAD ugly. You can pay over a thousand dollars for a cleaning suite and the UI would make you cry. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan12/articles/noise-reducti...

Professionals : They do not want pretty and will actually avoid products glorified. They just need something that works and allows them to have a work flow that gives them a great product at the end. It takes hours to get things done. There will be some solutions that almost requires a $500-$2,800+++ hardware piece just so you can actually work with the audio because a mouse isn't always the best tool. https://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_shop&view=shop&Ite...

Pro-Sumer: That would be like Adobe Audition (https://creative.adobe.com/products/audition) which as a UI isn't much better, but it does look nicer and the products have less features and just are not where professionals need to use them. Audition works great for Podcast and Online Education Courses but I used Audacity instead when I did Graduate Class Creation for the College I worked for.

Would anyone find Photoshop and the other Adobe design software and Premier to be a nice UI? It really is function over design.

PS I love tiled window managers and hate to have to use a mouse when I am working with a desktop computer so I am the last person to have design taste, but I find that this area of computer technology is just so different and a mouse and a nice UI do not make for a good interface. It is very abstract of the physical controllers. Kind of like playing a guitar on a iPad.

>> "Give me an example for a nice looking OS X audio editor in comparison?"

Logic Pro X. It looks good and is very functional. It's also a pro DAW. I've used many different DAW's over the years but Logic (in it's latest version) is the only one to have looked any good.

However, they have all been functional (easy to find what I need and do what I need to do). Audacity I have always found to have a confusing UI for a product used to do such simple editing. As has been said many times - design isn't about how it looks, it's about how it works.

Logic Pro X is Con-Sumer and not a professional. I did address that Con-Sumer wave editors do look nicer but they are limited in what they can do.

For single file wave form editing Audacity actually does more than Logic Pro. It is a good program and you can get a good end product but it certainly isn't professional nor extremely powerful.

Logic Pro X is very much a pro tool. There are a wide variety of professional musicians using it. For example Swedish House Mafia. Apple has certainly made it more user friendly to non-professionals and it no longer comes with a pro price point but it still has all the power necessary for pros.

I know you feel that this is true for you. I will just give you a good example of the review from Sound on Sound which is my favorite source for reviews.

Quote: Furthermore, the measures that Apple have taken to simplify the program mean that certain ways of working with previous versions now seem to be impossible. For example, previously if you had multiple Regions open in the Piano Roll editor, double-clicking a note would move you up a level and display only the notes from the Region to which the clicked note belonged. Now, double-clicking a note opens up the Event List (or the Score Editor if you hold down a modifier) and there seems no way to get back to the old way. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep13/articles/pro-x.htm

Logic Pro X really does feel like a good tool but the UI has huge waste of real estate and many things became hidden. This was also seen in the Final Cut X release and the major move back to Adobe Premier that it caused.

I do music everyday and I find Audition to be much easier to use. I started to use it after Audacity and I understood how it worked far more quickly. When I want to do something new I do not to search for 10 minutes unlike with Audacity. Audacity is good for its price, but it cannot be compared to "professional" tools.

And Pro Tools might be ugly, because it can be explained by the number of features and its use case. It cannot with Audacity.

Adobe Photoshop and Logic Pro X are the "pro" apps I use often and I can tell you it's relatively to them that Audacity feels like a poorly designed 1990-ish piece of software. Again we can't blame anyone for this, except I could just reiterate my question: why isn't the user experience a primary focus in the FOSS world? And it's not a rhetorical one.

I found Cockos' Reaper to be pretty good. Worth checking out, at least.

I hear of Reaper but never seen it out in the wild. Reading up on it makes me very interested in it. I am currently without a DAW that I like. I love Nuendo but I can't 1) afford or 2) Need that kind of product anymore.

I really like the GUI hacking and process hacking that it affords. Sounds like a cool idea that might actually have a way for everyone to have a GUI that they are responsible for.

Thanks.

Not in a position to speak for Audacity, but in my experience of doing user support for other projects, people can live with UX quirks as long as they can get work done.

But when the app doesn't do what you need it to do at all, quality of UX design becomes irrelevant.

Additionally, very few projects have access to UX experts (whose work isn't cheap).

> the user experience > hideous

I acknowledge your pain you experience using the program.

My user experience with Audacity has been excellent. In 45 minutes, I taught a roomful of people who speak a different language from mine to download Audacity, run it, learn to record sounds, edit them, apply effects and export them to a different format on three different operating systems, for free. Some of them are my facebook

My ex-girlfriend makes hundreds of dollars in passive income each month using Audacity in her workflow.

The spectral analysis features have been very useful to me.

> (Inkscape also comes to mind.)

I acknowledge your pain using Inkscape, too. I have been able to design amazing things with it and I enjoy sitting down with it, getting comfortable with it, learning the keyboard shortcuts, learning how to clone things in grids, making use of the grouping, opacity, stroke styles, etc. It helps to have experience with other CAD software. And I highly recommend searching the shortcuts list: https://inkscape.org/en/doc/keys046.html

I would love to learn how to import and export objects between spreadsheets with it...

Frankly, I don't remember about copy/paste from spreadsheet apps by now, but http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape-tables/ made adding tables to Inkscape slightly bearable a few years ago.

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