I love seeing the effort poured into Audacity. I don't do any music or audio production, but I occasionally have a need to record something for work, clip an audio file, or similar, and Audacity...
I love seeing the effort poured into Audacity. I don't do any music or audio production, but I occasionally have a need to record something for work, clip an audio file, or similar, and Audacity has been my go-to for as long as I can remember.
I'm definitely not a UI connoisseur (I use GIMP and don't get the fuss?), but I really appreciate the idea that there doesn't have to be some imposing barrier between software that's "for everyone" and that which is a "real tool". From my experience with it, Audacity has always made efforts to break down that wall, and it sounds like the future changes will continue to strive towards that goal.
I honestly think that GIMP is okay these days. It used to be quite bad on Windows specifically because there it used to use an old version of GTK (its GUI library) for the longest time, which was...
(I use GIMP and don't get the fuss?)
I honestly think that GIMP is okay these days. It used to be quite bad on Windows specifically because there it used to use an old version of GTK (its GUI library) for the longest time, which was buggy, produced incosistent behavior in various widgets etc. But that has been fixed for years now. I kind of prefer its GUI to parts of Audacity, lol.
I normally use Affinity Suite, which is definitely better, but GIMP is fine.
Recently I had to use various Adobe apps for work and I was appaled by some of their GUI design choices, likely present for historical reasons. I think a big part of GIMP GUI hate is just being used to somethind different.
Now if only it wasn't 20 years behind state of the art feature-wise, but that's a different issue. Still a cool application.
The things that bug me about GIMP are those that work differently from everything else for no good reason. Take the layers palette for instance. It looks like a typical list view but doesn’t act...
The things that bug me about GIMP are those that work differently from everything else for no good reason.
Take the layers palette for instance. It looks like a typical list view but doesn’t act like one (no shift-click multi select and such) and while its design might’ve made sense when it was conceived, the world has long since standardized on layers palettes that act roughly like that of Photoshop, meaning it’s not just former Adobe users that it bothers.
This has been fixed in either 3.0 or the current 3.1.4 development build. It may still be missing some other common idioms, not sure, but work has been done on both the GUI and functionality of...
(no shift-click multi select and such)
This has been fixed in either 3.0 or the current 3.1.4 development build. It may still be missing some other common idioms, not sure, but work has been done on both the GUI and functionality of the layers panel (the development build now has filter layers, better functioning groups, vector layers and external link layers iirc).
Many of those clearly missing things have been frozen for years because there was a lot of work on the underlying image processing engine to be done, which had priority and needed to be finished before GIMP 3.0 came out. The development team is small, apparently most people don't really want to work on a somewhat outdated image processing application in C, which is understandable.
Open source projects in general. I honestly think most open source projects have a smaller team behind it than most people realize. In fact, outside bigger funded projects it often comes down to...
apparently most people don't really want to work on
Open source projects in general. I honestly think most open source projects have a smaller team behind it than most people realize. In fact, outside bigger funded projects it often comes down to one or two core developers with some incidental contributions over the years.
It's a bigger problem to find contributors for GIMP than for say Krita and other similar (or smaller) projects. I wouldn't want to be writing a graphics processing GUI application in C either, so...
It's a bigger problem to find contributors for GIMP than for say Krita and other similar (or smaller) projects. I wouldn't want to be writing a graphics processing GUI application in C either, so I don't blame anyone. GEGL, the core of GIMP, is also arguably more ambitious than it might seem from the outside.
I keep GIMP and Affinity Designer 2 on my computer. I know there's Affinity Photo, but I'm so accustomed to GIMP that it's nearly impossible to switch over to anything else. I just get lost trying...
I keep GIMP and Affinity Designer 2 on my computer. I know there's Affinity Photo, but I'm so accustomed to GIMP that it's nearly impossible to switch over to anything else. I just get lost trying to figure out stuff I could do in 2-5 minutes in GIMP.
That said, I still set up GIMP the way I did when I started using it way back when Adobe started moving to the Cloud stuff and ditched out on Photoshop 7.0 which was my software of choice at the time. Considering how very little I needed PS's actual photo-editing capabilities, GIMP was a wise choice for me. And ever since, when I have a new computer or for some reason I need to reinstall and set up GIMP again, I basically configure it to work almost identically to an over 20 year old version of Photoshop.
I think the reason I was able to adopt Affinity Designer is because I didn't have the same kind of inertia behind things like Inkscape as I do with GIMP.
I understand. The reason why I bought the Affinity Suite is that some workflows are simply impossible or a huge pain in GIMP. For photo editing I use smart selection, non-destructive filters...
I just get lost trying to figure out stuff I could do in 2-5 minutes in GIMP.
I understand. The reason why I bought the Affinity Suite is that some workflows are simply impossible or a huge pain in GIMP. For photo editing I use smart selection, non-destructive filters (filter layers/adjustment layers) and inpainting as the very basis of what I do, this is a very common workflow in some types of photography. And it's impossible in current versions of GIMP, whereas in Photoshop it has been available for I think about 20 years now. It's likely finally going to be present in the upcoming 3.x versions, so that's cool.
That makes sense; I haven’t needed to do actual photo editing in decades, so I’ve never prioritized those capabilities in my software. I’ll have to check out the GIMP 3 stuff and see how...
That makes sense; I haven’t needed to do actual photo editing in decades, so I’ve never prioritized those capabilities in my software. I’ll have to check out the GIMP 3 stuff and see how development is going. Some of why I haven’t bothered with photo editing is because I lack the tools, funnily enough.
I believe you can do those things in Photopea, which is ad-supported freeware and runs only in browser - something I hate, but I have to admit it's an incredibly cool piece of software - and I...
I believe you can do those things in Photopea, which is ad-supported freeware and runs only in browser - something I hate, but I have to admit it's an incredibly cool piece of software - and I believe you can also do most of it within Darktable these days, possibly even in RawTherapee (both free software) or some forks, if you shoot in raw.
I love Audacity, its not as powerful as something like RX Pro or Pro tools but it does everything an amateur could need and more. I've always had some stability issues with it though unfortunately...
I love Audacity, its not as powerful as something like RX Pro or Pro tools but it does everything an amateur could need and more. I've always had some stability issues with it though unfortunately (It seems like every editing software has this issue for some reason), but with proper autosaving its not that big of a deal.
The real thing that makes audacity so awesome is its robust suite of free plugins that the community has developed over the years. So many things that Audacity can't do itself can be added to it by downloading a plugin.
Does anybody have a good update to the security concerns of yesteryear? A lot of the posts arguing against the notion of spyware are from Audacity themselves, and I haven't been able to find a...
Does anybody have a good update to the security concerns of yesteryear? A lot of the posts arguing against the notion of spyware are from Audacity themselves, and I haven't been able to find a good reputable conversation on it in a while. I'm not trying to sow seeds of doubt but just get a discussion on it, since my assumption is that this new iteration of Audacity is going to probably rework a lot of the under-the-hood stuff, which would include the quiet telemetry that's been scrutinized before.
This doesn't really matter at all, but the new logo feels very bland corporate. Flat monotones that can be drawn in under 10 SVG shapes are just so common. I'm not going to say I hate it or...
This doesn't really matter at all, but the new logo feels very bland corporate. Flat monotones that can be drawn in under 10 SVG shapes are just so common. I'm not going to say I hate it or anything, I don't care enough about software iconography to have that strong of an opinion, but it is quite forgettable.
Apart from feeling bland corporate I think it's also just not that good. But the old one feels too "oldschool open source", so I understand why they wanted to change it.
Apart from feeling bland corporate I think it's also just not that good. But the old one feels too "oldschool open source", so I understand why they wanted to change it.
To preface, I have so much respect for Tantacrul and believe him to be an excellent designer! I hope that this rant is not perceived as targeted or meanspirited in the slightest! I find it really...
To preface, I have so much respect for Tantacrul and believe him to be an excellent designer! I hope that this rant is not perceived as targeted or meanspirited in the slightest!
I find it really surprising and confusing to see him break down in this video all of the market research used to justify the changes he’s made to this software in the past half-decade, considering the (to my eye) total misunderstanding of the software and why people use it. I have for a long time, and will for a long time more, use Audacity extensively, and it’s one of the only tools out there that I’d really consider myself experienced to such a degree, yet I still worry for the time in the future where 2.x releases, before Tantacrul took over, lose support on contemporary OSes. 3.x started to implement some interesting UX overhauls, which I could at least understand despite the major regression on the optimisation front, but it was disheartening to see Audacity turned before my eyes slowly into just-another-DAW.
Those that used Audacity for music (myself included to a major degree, albeit not my only use case), used it for its simplicity and its musical agnosticism. The lack of tempo, tonality, VSTs, and FX chains, wasn’t impeding users’ ability to create music—that’s why DAWs exist, and using Audacity alongside a DAW was a perfect chemistry! Said simplicity and agnosticism was the main selling point of this amazing software for those of us that used it for music, and now it’s been overhauled into a DAW I’m not sure if there exists software that does what it did to this quality anymore; only old unmaintained forks or legacy versions that won’t live forever.
Tantacrul is a truly, truly talented designer with an excellent eye and so much talent—which is why it’s so sad to see his misunderstanding of Audacity continue, costing a tool that I was genuinely so passionate about and that changed my life.
Didn't the video address this in the "Building Audacity 4" section? It looks like all those DAW features (tempo, tonality, effects) can be hidden via the Workspace feature. He discuses a Music...
Didn't the video address this in the "Building Audacity 4" section? It looks like all those DAW features (tempo, tonality, effects) can be hidden via the Workspace feature. He discuses a Music workspace which would contain those features, but emphasizes that it's not the only way their new UI can present itself.
Note: I rarely use DAWs, so maybe I'm missing what makes these v4 changes alarming.
I saw this breakdown when he released it on Nebula, and I’ve got to say it’s got some exciting changes, even though I only open Audacity once in a blue moon. I’m sticking with Ocenaudio for now,...
I saw this breakdown when he released it on Nebula, and I’ve got to say it’s got some exciting changes, even though I only open Audacity once in a blue moon. I’m sticking with Ocenaudio for now, but once Audacity 4 hits I’ll check it out for sure.
I used to use Audacity quite a bit but moved to Audition. Pretty good video and the new UI / framework seems great. This seems to cover a lot of the basics from Audition, too, which is slick. I...
I used to use Audacity quite a bit but moved to Audition. Pretty good video and the new UI / framework seems great. This seems to cover a lot of the basics from Audition, too, which is slick.
I love seeing the effort poured into Audacity. I don't do any music or audio production, but I occasionally have a need to record something for work, clip an audio file, or similar, and Audacity has been my go-to for as long as I can remember.
I'm definitely not a UI connoisseur (I use GIMP and don't get the fuss?), but I really appreciate the idea that there doesn't have to be some imposing barrier between software that's "for everyone" and that which is a "real tool". From my experience with it, Audacity has always made efforts to break down that wall, and it sounds like the future changes will continue to strive towards that goal.
I honestly think that GIMP is okay these days. It used to be quite bad on Windows specifically because there it used to use an old version of GTK (its GUI library) for the longest time, which was buggy, produced incosistent behavior in various widgets etc. But that has been fixed for years now. I kind of prefer its GUI to parts of Audacity, lol.
I normally use Affinity Suite, which is definitely better, but GIMP is fine.
Recently I had to use various Adobe apps for work and I was appaled by some of their GUI design choices, likely present for historical reasons. I think a big part of GIMP GUI hate is just being used to somethind different.
Now if only it wasn't 20 years behind state of the art feature-wise, but that's a different issue. Still a cool application.
The things that bug me about GIMP are those that work differently from everything else for no good reason.
Take the layers palette for instance. It looks like a typical list view but doesn’t act like one (no shift-click multi select and such) and while its design might’ve made sense when it was conceived, the world has long since standardized on layers palettes that act roughly like that of Photoshop, meaning it’s not just former Adobe users that it bothers.
This has been fixed in either 3.0 or the current 3.1.4 development build. It may still be missing some other common idioms, not sure, but work has been done on both the GUI and functionality of the layers panel (the development build now has filter layers, better functioning groups, vector layers and external link layers iirc).
Many of those clearly missing things have been frozen for years because there was a lot of work on the underlying image processing engine to be done, which had priority and needed to be finished before GIMP 3.0 came out. The development team is small, apparently most people don't really want to work on a somewhat outdated image processing application in C, which is understandable.
Open source projects in general. I honestly think most open source projects have a smaller team behind it than most people realize. In fact, outside bigger funded projects it often comes down to one or two core developers with some incidental contributions over the years.
It's a bigger problem to find contributors for GIMP than for say Krita and other similar (or smaller) projects. I wouldn't want to be writing a graphics processing GUI application in C either, so I don't blame anyone. GEGL, the core of GIMP, is also arguably more ambitious than it might seem from the outside.
Krita seems to have a better grip on things like marketing and such which also helps. It actually reminds me of how Blender is run.
I keep GIMP and Affinity Designer 2 on my computer. I know there's Affinity Photo, but I'm so accustomed to GIMP that it's nearly impossible to switch over to anything else. I just get lost trying to figure out stuff I could do in 2-5 minutes in GIMP.
That said, I still set up GIMP the way I did when I started using it way back when Adobe started moving to the Cloud stuff and ditched out on Photoshop 7.0 which was my software of choice at the time. Considering how very little I needed PS's actual photo-editing capabilities, GIMP was a wise choice for me. And ever since, when I have a new computer or for some reason I need to reinstall and set up GIMP again, I basically configure it to work almost identically to an over 20 year old version of Photoshop.
I think the reason I was able to adopt Affinity Designer is because I didn't have the same kind of inertia behind things like Inkscape as I do with GIMP.
I understand. The reason why I bought the Affinity Suite is that some workflows are simply impossible or a huge pain in GIMP. For photo editing I use smart selection, non-destructive filters (filter layers/adjustment layers) and inpainting as the very basis of what I do, this is a very common workflow in some types of photography. And it's impossible in current versions of GIMP, whereas in Photoshop it has been available for I think about 20 years now. It's likely finally going to be present in the upcoming 3.x versions, so that's cool.
That makes sense; I haven’t needed to do actual photo editing in decades, so I’ve never prioritized those capabilities in my software. I’ll have to check out the GIMP 3 stuff and see how development is going. Some of why I haven’t bothered with photo editing is because I lack the tools, funnily enough.
I believe you can do those things in Photopea, which is ad-supported freeware and runs only in browser - something I hate, but I have to admit it's an incredibly cool piece of software - and I believe you can also do most of it within Darktable these days, possibly even in RawTherapee (both free software) or some forks, if you shoot in raw.
Good info, though I do also disdain browser-only tools. Might be worth the low entry bar.
I love Audacity, its not as powerful as something like RX Pro or Pro tools but it does everything an amateur could need and more. I've always had some stability issues with it though unfortunately (It seems like every editing software has this issue for some reason), but with proper autosaving its not that big of a deal.
The real thing that makes audacity so awesome is its robust suite of free plugins that the community has developed over the years. So many things that Audacity can't do itself can be added to it by downloading a plugin.
Does anybody have a good update to the security concerns of yesteryear? A lot of the posts arguing against the notion of spyware are from Audacity themselves, and I haven't been able to find a good reputable conversation on it in a while. I'm not trying to sow seeds of doubt but just get a discussion on it, since my assumption is that this new iteration of Audacity is going to probably rework a lot of the under-the-hood stuff, which would include the quiet telemetry that's been scrutinized before.
This doesn't really matter at all, but the new logo feels very bland corporate. Flat monotones that can be drawn in under 10 SVG shapes are just so common. I'm not going to say I hate it or anything, I don't care enough about software iconography to have that strong of an opinion, but it is quite forgettable.
Apart from feeling bland corporate I think it's also just not that good. But the old one feels too "oldschool open source", so I understand why they wanted to change it.
Yeah totally agreed. Changing it was the right call, but the end result is pretty meh.
To preface, I have so much respect for Tantacrul and believe him to be an excellent designer! I hope that this rant is not perceived as targeted or meanspirited in the slightest!
I find it really surprising and confusing to see him break down in this video all of the market research used to justify the changes he’s made to this software in the past half-decade, considering the (to my eye) total misunderstanding of the software and why people use it. I have for a long time, and will for a long time more, use Audacity extensively, and it’s one of the only tools out there that I’d really consider myself experienced to such a degree, yet I still worry for the time in the future where 2.x releases, before Tantacrul took over, lose support on contemporary OSes. 3.x started to implement some interesting UX overhauls, which I could at least understand despite the major regression on the optimisation front, but it was disheartening to see Audacity turned before my eyes slowly into just-another-DAW.
Those that used Audacity for music (myself included to a major degree, albeit not my only use case), used it for its simplicity and its musical agnosticism. The lack of tempo, tonality, VSTs, and FX chains, wasn’t impeding users’ ability to create music—that’s why DAWs exist, and using Audacity alongside a DAW was a perfect chemistry! Said simplicity and agnosticism was the main selling point of this amazing software for those of us that used it for music, and now it’s been overhauled into a DAW I’m not sure if there exists software that does what it did to this quality anymore; only old unmaintained forks or legacy versions that won’t live forever.
Tantacrul is a truly, truly talented designer with an excellent eye and so much talent—which is why it’s so sad to see his misunderstanding of Audacity continue, costing a tool that I was genuinely so passionate about and that changed my life.
Didn't the video address this in the "Building Audacity 4" section? It looks like all those DAW features (tempo, tonality, effects) can be hidden via the Workspace feature. He discuses a Music workspace which would contain those features, but emphasizes that it's not the only way their new UI can present itself.
Note: I rarely use DAWs, so maybe I'm missing what makes these v4 changes alarming.
I saw this breakdown when he released it on Nebula, and I’ve got to say it’s got some exciting changes, even though I only open Audacity once in a blue moon. I’m sticking with Ocenaudio for now, but once Audacity 4 hits I’ll check it out for sure.
I used to use Audacity quite a bit but moved to Audition. Pretty good video and the new UI / framework seems great. This seems to cover a lot of the basics from Audition, too, which is slick.
I really like the black waveform, too.