
The Future of Audacity, Interview with the Team - baldfat
http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-future-of-audacity-interview-with-the-team
======
mojuba
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?

~~~
baldfat
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](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](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...](http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan12/articles/noise-
reduction.htm)

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...](https://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_shop&view=shop&Itemid=205&select=20)

Pro-Sumer: That would be like Adobe Audition
([https://creative.adobe.com/products/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.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "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.

~~~
baldfat
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.

~~~
k-mcgrady
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.

~~~
baldfat
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](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.

------
baldfat
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.

------
bayesianhorse
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.

------
haberman
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. :)

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

It was Markus Meyer :)

