Probably no big external dependencies or any assets. It looks like something full of handwritten code, down to the self-rendered UI-elements. Also it's written in C/C++ and assembler, so there is no unnecessary bloat shipped out-of-the-box.
Just an educated guess, but perhaps there are optional dependencies missing in the arm64 version. Some programs are still broken or perform badly on arm64.
How big are the project files these days? In the .aup3 format all source material was rendered into one big pile, so with lots of "raw tape" (e.g. for a radio show) the session files became huge. It was annoying to transport an 1.5 GB session file between two machines even via network.
Reaper and Pro Tools (and many other DAWs), in contrast, had the source material in one folder and the session file essentially just documented the edits. These small session files could be exported even via email.
The .aup3 format was one of the reasons why I decided to ditch Audacity3 for radio editing back in the day. And, it used to lag heavily when I had a project with several hundred cuts done via "ripple editing". All this was years ago, though.
I concluded that Audacity v1.2.6 was the high point of this software and, indeed, tried to go back into using that one for a while (in 2019 or 2021 or so)! It was fast enough, very simple, young, raw, robust, but it still had its early 2000s open source enthusiasm charm. :)
I have been using Audacity 3 for making music with samples for a few years. And it sort of worked, but there were a lot of things that were inconvenient, like the project sometimes not saving, or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip.
I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them.
> or getting a "clicking" noise across clips that I had to remove by manually fading in/out each end of the clip
Are you sure this isn't just the typical "clip/crop a sample at the wrong moment, in the middle of a soundwave, and you'll get a pop/click"? This problem happens all across DAWs and hardware samplers and such, usually there is a way to "align to zero-crossings" when you wanna avoid it, or called something similar. I'd be surprised if Audacity didn't have that optionally since before, or that they didn't have it before but now with Audacity 4 it would suddenly be used automatically, that'd be somewhat strange too.
At least with Reaper, if you cut an audio clip it will, by default, automatically apply small adjustable fade in/out envelopes to the ends so you specifically don't have to manually do it.
Yeah, every software/hardware seems to deal with this differently. The sampler I use the most (Octatrack) only jumps by zero-crossings when holding SHIFT, otherwise lets you freely create entirely new pops and cracks in your songs :)
I think you're right. Audacity does have a "zero-crossings" thing, but when I tried using it a long time ago, it didn't seem to work, and I just learned to do fade-in/out for everything. Maybe I did something incorrectly.
> I just learned to do fade-in/out for everything. Maybe I did something incorrectly.
This is the de-facto standard practice for fixing/working around that particular issue, so I don't think it's incorrect at all :) Besides, however you fix an issue and it sounds good, it's correct :)
I think what they mean is it looks like a hodgepodge of different DAWs, aka: designed by a committee who's only point of references are features in other done software. It doesn't look like it has its own visual identity.
It looks like a well crafted UI, with care and attention to detail. The kind of thing that takes coordination. Scrum can help with that.
The grandparent poster seemed to be claiming the opposite: that scrum makes such things harder to achieve. That doesn’t match my experience. I think you can make a polished product, or a mess, using any of a variety of coordination technuqies. If anything, the planning technique is orthogonal to the cohesion of the product (although IMO if you do Scrum well, you’ll probably find it easier to coordinate towards a high cohesion product). But Scrum (or any well run system) is not the only factor. At a minimum you need a team who want a high cohesion product; you need some people who can help steer production towards a high-cohesion product; you need to have people on the team willing to have their opinions challenged from time to time; and, if you’ll indulge a little axe-grinding, you need the younger team members to trust the more experienced ones.
Looks great. I remember a company sort of bought it but afaict they didn’t monetize it. I don’t remember the strategy, or why it was acquired, does anyone recall it?
They must have abandoned such plans (if they had any) when they got some backlash after they added telemetry features and half a dozen forks popped up overnight.
It’s the same company that bought MuseScore, they basically plan on monetizing it through plugins, audio samples, or optional cloud services (like MuseScore)
I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch!
Yes, Tantacrul. Pretty weird story, a composer and programmer who absolutely roasted the UIs of well known sheet music dinosaurs Finale and Sibelius in hilarious diss videos on YouTube. Then he conceded a bit reluctantly that Musescore was the better of the lot, but still had plenty of opinions on how it could be better.
So the guitar tabs website which had then recently acquired Musescore offered him a job. Not just a job, but basically to be boss of the whole thing. Then they bought audacity, staffpad and Hal Leonard too. Then they bought out their private equity backer.
I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up. They haven't enshittified it (from my perspective as a user anyway). It seems in the end these people just loved music more than they loved money.
> I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up.
Just remember bad news sells. I'm reasonably sure there are a number of other cases where this happens, likely most. However they are not big news and not memorable so I can't cite them.
I remember using Audacity back in 2006-ish, I just needed some basic mp3 editing and I was so happy with it. Has been my go to audio editor for, goodness feels weird to say, decades now, awesome to hear them staying alive and improving. Hooray opensource / PE not killing something good!
This site is a lot like how I remember ultimate guitar, being that you can look up tabs and access them. I hope people keep uploading more tabs because ultimate still has a larger volume
So, they've realized podcasters and vloggers are a large part of their target audience. Then I believe they have to implement some models for speech restoration.
These days most people just Adobe Podcast Enhance and forget.
Must add that it's so awesome to have an open source Qt based audio editor on KDE Plasma that does not look like shit!
Indirectly related his video on music notation itself, "Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music"[1], is really good IMHO.
> Many people feel that western notation makes it unnecessarily hard to read music. If we want to sight read, learn music theory or just practice an instrument, surely there's a better way? Right? This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
Notation is cool and just right, the more I learned the more I appreciated how great contemporary notation is. Yes it's challenging to read sometines but the subject is challenging too, surely you could try to simplify it for certain applications but you'd lose a lot of flexibility.
Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard which is also extremely convenient thing to play compared to other stuff, even to grid controllers.
I find conventional Western notation works quite well for communicating notes, rhythms, and basic expression, but it breaks down pretty quickly once you move beyond that. E.g. a lot of the common techniques on electric guitar (bends, palm muting, tremolo/whammy bar stuff, pick slides, slap/thumping, pinch harmonics, raking) don't really have a convenient notational shorthand. That's without even mentioning synthesizers (how do you notate 'gradually increase the filter cutoff here'?) and DAWs, samplers, drum machines. But it's definitely a hard problem: the more information you try to shove into a notational system, the harder it gets for people to keep track of what everything means. Plus you just start running out of easily distinguishable symbols at some point.
Not sure what you consider convenient, but I’ve never had a problem reading electric guitar notation. It’s handled the same way we notate extended technique for other instruments - a combination of text above the staff, and squiggly lines on it :)
I'm not sure what you are talking about wrt guitar and standard notation. Finger (PIMA) indication, staccato/legato, vibrato, tremolo, slurs, hammer, pulls, etc...it's all there. I don't see as much notation around hammer/pull as a classical player, but pick up a classical guitar music book sometime...you'll find that everything (guitar-related) you mentioned needing to be included, is already included.
What?! I'm surprised those are the things you complain about regarding guitar sheet music.
The only real problem is guitar always has several different ways to play the same notes all over the neck and instrument tuning isn't always specified either.
Standard tuning may not work and tabs sometimes aren't there alongside the staff. If you're trying to sight read, you'll guess alright for a while until you are suddenly forced to make heroic leaps to the other end of the neck or painfully contort your fingers just so you don't miss a beat.
I guess I am maybe not coming from the same place you are here, but, fwiw, scores for classical guitar will often mark bare positions (basically, what fret your 1 finger is around) at certain points with Roman numerals, which then communicates, or at least implies, which string you are playing which note (for that part, until you see a new roman numeral). Also common to see simply a number on a specific note indicating a finger, as you do for a note+finger combo with piano scores, which then implies how to play the rest of the notes in that phrase or whatever. I don't think you need much more than that and it seems elegant enough to me!
But also, really, I was always taught that unless the composer specifies something specific, you are free to figure it on your own. Like there are only so many contexts where the timbral differences between two unison, fretted notes is going to matter probably, right? Also, how you play some part might be informed by where you are after the preceding part etc.
Tuning point though is kinda interesting and not all my wheel house. But they do call the default one standard for a reason!
Yes. I am thinking about rock, jazz, and fingerstyle playing. They're hardly edge cases and haven't been for decades. They're so popular and modern enough to prove the original point.
With regards to tuning, fingerstyle will often feature an arbitrary tuning unique to only a handful of songs. Timbre absolutely matters because you're playing multiple parts on one fretboard simultaneously.
> (how do you notate 'gradually increase the filter cutoff here'?)
Use freeform text; it's a standard part of musical notation. Just because most of what you see on a score is some form or another of shorthand doesn't mean everything is.
How do you think Tom Lehrer was able to indicate a tempo of "Pornissimo"?
> Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard
Interestingly, the current form of a piano keyboard isn't only way keyed instruments have been laid out.
My mind was blown when I first saw a harpsichord with separate flat and sharp keys for example because I never considered the concept. I grew up with pianos so in my ignorance I never really thought about them being different.
The fundamental problem in music notation is that it was designed for an 8 note system and we use a 12 note system. It's.. fine I guess, they got those extra four notes in there and millions of people read music with no problems. But it does create a lot of confusion for novice readers who now think those 8 notes are somehow more important than the other 4 or that the sharps and flats are somehow half notes(they are not, all 12 are equally spaced on a log scale) and don't even get me started on the confusing terminology, there are 12 notes in an octet, semitones? a fifth? a fifth of what? it is seven notes or 3/2's their is no 5.
With regard to the piano keyboard, again not terrible, but it definitely is a compromise to fit the mechanical needs of the piano. I really like the design of the chromatic keyboard(ever see an accordion with the big hex grid of buttons, this is a chromatic keyboard), it has the advantage that whatever key you play a song in it has the same fingering, on a piano every key has different fingering, so there is a big skill barrier to changing keys that interferes with employment of such a critical aspect of playing.
To sum up: you don’t like the current notation system, terminology and piano keys but also don’t have anything else to add to the discussion other than “I don’t like it”.
It is sort of like english spelling, we all know spelling in english sucks(So pointlessly difficult we have contests centered around the skill), we also all know we can do nothing to fix it. Still gonna complain about it however.
To me it's worse because you have to know which version of English. Is it grey or gray, color or colour, shop or shoppe? At least boot is spelled boot even if it is the trunk.
I'll watch the video later but is it more difficult for singers or musicians of particular instruments?
For example, if you number the tones and have a piano style instrument with alternating white and black keys, then you can have a 6 line stave where spaces are always white keys and black keys are always lines.
I think the argument is that it gets harder to recognise tonal intervals the further they get apart.
When sight reading chords pianists, for example, don't really think about every note in the chord.
Instead if you recognise the intervals between the notes and the root you can just place your hand without thinking about it too much.
Since most of the time you're in a single musical key you don't need see every tone separately. You can still flatten, sharpen or normal and you can represent key changes too.
There are other details such as beginners often already using numbers to indicate preferred fingering.
I'm sure there would be workarounds but there's a lot of edge case that standard notation already supports.
I think that's a property of the piano though. If every note had an exact lining, it would seem to work better (unless you were very used to the old system).
I would still take more space on the page to represent the same amount of music which is also important.
Many people have tried to replace standard notation, over several hundred years, and no one has yet come up with a compelling alternative. So it's probably a very difficult task.
If you're really serious about proposing an alternative I would probably start by considering why other competing systems have failed.
Yes, it would take more space, that's definitely a drawback. You might end up having to have 2 staves for each part.
I'm not really serious about replacing it, more like writing your own OS: it's fun to do and you get a better understanding of why the existing systems work.
> semitones? a fifth? a fifth of what? it is seven notes or 3/2's there is no 5.
I learned to read sheet music as a kid by my mom taking me to piano lessons. I cannot play the piano but I know where the notes are that correspond to the sheet music. I parlayed that into learning to play woodwinds when I got older. Even that was just enough to have fun. Nothing about it was me being serious about being a musician. So when other students would talk about 5ths and 3rds, I was totally lost. Then someone just said transpose the note up/down 5 notes (or 3 or whatever). They said it confidently, and they were first chair, so I went with it. I've never needed to know it, as I just play the notes as written on the sheet. I've never gigged where I had to play different keys.
But yeah, the fifth nomenclature confused the hell out of me too
I've thought the same, but as I really started to play and compose some music, it became clear that we almost exclusively use 5-7 note systems within a part of a music piece, and accidentals give great hints about what's going on musically. There is no need to use whole 12 semitones on the staff all the time
The problem with linnstrument and similar things is exactly equality of any note, it's not easy to think like "ok, here we move to another key, so we have to add one sharp here" on a controller like that. For me, even on a guitar I have to "see" the notes to play well and understand what I'm playing, so I had to learn "white keys" on the fretboard, and on top of that, learn octave numbers for each note, only then it really works for me and it's still hard compared to the keyboard where you see all sharps and flats and can treat them as you like. That's more important than using the same muscle memory imo
A lot of Chesterton’s Fence going on here… I remember thinking this way when I still had a pretty low-level understanding of music (like, “I’m reading arbitrary pitches and pushing the matching keys on the piano”), but once I started understanding bigger musical concepts/chunks, the reason for the notation became clearer, and now I see why it’s a pretty good local maximum for readability.
The majority of music uses a system of intervals called the major scale, which is seven notes with a particular spacing that is determined largely by psychoacoustics (that is, we didn’t just make it up). That spacing can be shifted around to any point on the underlying 12-note system, which gives different keys/modes. On any single piece of music you’re typically using only one of those, so those seven notes are the “skeleton” underlying it all. This is what it means to say “this piece is in D major”. (BTW, a fifth is the fifth note in the major scale, so yes, there is a 5!)
Standard notation privileges these modes of the major scale, which means (assuming you know how to play all the major scales on your instrument) there’s a 1:1 mapping from places on the staff to scale degrees. That means most of the time you’re reading straight off the score into the scale your fingers have memorized.
The key signature is what makes this work. You can even instantly transpose by ignoring the written key signature and reading in another key. Chords are also made readable because they’re usually based on thirds, which happens to be the interval that makes the notes stack up exactly next to each other, so a triad, seventh chord, etc. is instantly recognizable.
So basically the notation is optimized for the common case (the music is using notes from a mode of the major scale) and makes exceptions (accidentals) stand out.
And yes, pianos are a pain because all the (musical) keys are different on the (physical) keys. However, pianos are great because all the octaves look exactly alike (so finding all the Ds on the keyboard is trivial). Stringed instruments like guitars or violins are the opposite: all the (musical) key fingerings are the same, but you have to memorize the positions of all the notes because they all look the same. Pick your poison.
Totally agree with your comment, but I just wanted to add that the major scales aren’t what’s prioritized - every major scale has a parallel minor scale with the same key signature.
In fact, this is true for all diatonic scales, which are the foundation of Western music and have been for centuries. The major scale is just the ionic, the minor is the aeolian. There’s also dorian, phrygian, lydian, etc., and all of these are in active use in popular music.
(Shout-out to our often overlooked friend, the lochrian scale. IYKYK. Practically unheard outside of Gregorian chants and metal.)
Aaargh! OK, you made me look it up. :) The word is "chordophone" (an instrument that makes sound from vibrating strings). A "fretted" instrument is a chordphone whose pitches are fixed by frets. But I can't find a word for the class I'm talking about, "a chordophone with a fingerboard", as opposed to a piano, which is a chordophone with one string per pitch (and is also a percussion instrument!).
This is why solfege aka "movable/relative do" is better than chromatic naming for theory. Because "a fifth of what?" is trivial - its the fifth named pitch relative to another named pitch. And almost all modern music is not about absolute pitch but the relationship of intervals, either in a single voice sequence or across multiple moving voices.
The transition from absolute to relative pitch is like moving from basic arithmetic to algebra, once it clicks. Except that relative pitch is way easier to understand without notation, pick a reference and go from there.
Interestingly this is a strong thing to fight because there are pieces of music that are physically inaccessible to many players, particularly people with hands not wide enough for the intervals. No amount of practice or stretching can overcome it and you can't exactly travel with a piano or keyboard everywhere.
There some cool things like the Janko keyboard that seem strictly superior to the traditional 12 keys but it's kind of an uphill fight to build conversion kits cheap and light and good enough to travel and perform with.
I'm a musician, and am fluent at sight-reading. My perspective doesn't even consider the pro's and con's of conventional notation. The network effect is overwhelming.
Written music involves a symbiosis between the composer and the performer. You have to find people who are willing to do both of those jobs, in sufficient number to make performances happen. If you choose a new or idiosyncratic notation system, nobody will play your stuff.
In the future one could imagine automating the process of converting from one notation to another. But a lot of sheet music is still not in computer readable form. From what I've read, OCR'ing sheet music is still an unsolved problem.
His video about reality TV music, and the one about the newest musescore default font, are some of my favourite yt videos of all time. Great communicator.
How arrogant of the Musescore developers to think they know better than hundreds of years of historical music notation by actual musicians. Seems in line with their arrogant disregard for the community and bad Audacity overhaul and nonsensical rebranding.
Alternately, if you want to go on the same journey Keary (the person you mention) went on to form an opinion on what constitutes good vs. bad UX design in music/notation/DAW software, they've also put out a whole series of videos taking the piss out of the UX of most of the software in the field:
Glad to see this, reminds me of decades ago of using Audacity to crudely extract vocals by cancelling out audio tracks using its accompanying instrumental track.
Invert the instrument track in Audacity and align the waveform and it acts as a crude noise (instrument) cancellation and that leaves you with vocal track.
Not perfect since some instruments can still be heard faintly but sufficient enough for my needs back then.
Not trying to hate because a FOSS audio editor is great, but all of these UI improvements are carbon copies from conventional DAWs or video editors, invented 30 or so years ago. Like giving audio clips a header which lets you move them around, or letting you adjust the audio clip start/end by dragging the start/end of the clip, are not exactly revolutionary in 2026. Maybe Audacity will re-invent automation lanes next? I'm not against it. I don't see how any of this requires user studies and the framing as some kind of breakthrough though.
Very disappointed to see a program I remembered fondly for its native-feeling interface move to whatever this is. It’s akin to a nutrient-rich home cooked meal being replaced with McDonald’s. I should’ve known it was doomed from the moment
I saw an advertisement for their Discord chat room in the readme.
This doesn't feel like very constructive feedback. Have you actually tried 4.0 yet, or were you too put off by the Discord link to proceed?
Audacity has never felt particularly native-feeling to me, and I don't buy the McDonalds analogy - this release is still lightweight. It'd be a fair comment if they'd e.g. move to Electron, but Qt 6 is hardly that.
Audacity was fooling no one that it was a native MacOS app, or even a particularly well designed GTK app. The fundamental idea of WX is not sound. Turns out MFC is not a great abstraction for AppKit.
Even Qt uses some higher level native UI interfaces on its respective implementations.
Trying to shoe horn multiplatform UI into MFC? Just look at Unicode. It’s an unholy mess.
The only toolkit to do what it does? Qt does what it does, even if the approach is not the same (arguably superior), there’s also Tk. There’s also libui and IUP.
open source apps can be insanely powerful (and free!) but a thing that keeps a lot of them from 'mainstream' adoption is simply the F-tier user experience
gimp had the same issue and i wouldnt be surprised if you also miss the old GTK UI?
making audacity feel like a modern app instead of a dusty relic isnt making it into McDonalds..
I for one applaud this upgrade -- its the polish it should have had years ago
Many will discover >=Qt5 GL sometimes breaks in non-repairable ways on some linux desktops.
On windows 11, Qt is usually fine if the license is still compatible... The old wxWidgets supports native OS interface targeting being truly cross-platform.
Like all eye-candy interfaces at Microsoft, it will work until it doesn't. =3
Yeah, it's sad to see how such a great program was ruined by yet another company. Opened it the other day and was greeted with a welcome screen that advertised some online service, then I had to turn off telemetry and there is some cloud integration now?
I just started the appimage - it asks you to login to the "cloud" but also offers a prominent skip button, and then asks if you want a telemetry UUID or not.
Not sure, but since I've installed is as a Flatpak (org.audacityteam.Audacity) I simply disable its network capabilities via com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
This way, even if they had telemetry, I wouldn't really care.
>> The following Audacity 3 features are not available in Audacity 4.0, but we're working on adding them in future releases.
Time Tracks
Note/MIDI tracks
Mixer
Macro Manager and the scripting pipe
VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting
Play-at-speed
Sync-Lock and the old tool modes were replaced by the workflows described above.
>>Additionally, Audacity 4 ships with some missing exporting and rendering features, analyzers, and effects.
the release date is decided before the work even starts. Whatever's done gets released, and marketing gets to claim a new major version. When it's still a work in progress. All software works like this nowadays (I'm sure it doesn't really.... but it sure looks that way). A lot of software I use have missing features in their latest major version
Should watch the pre release video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
If what they're saying is true, this project is very much a pile of tech debt. They need to migrate whatever they can early before continuing work on the audio engine.
it might be ancient, but it's also very simple. it's relatively easy to import a single header and write a working plug-in, which makes it attractive for enthusiasts.
If anyone here has contributed to Audacity I just want to say thank you. I'm not a power user. I'm not in audio. However, over the years I have installed Audacity to do some audio things here and there. It has always been so useful.
Wasn't audacity taken over by a company sniffing for user data, some years ago?
I noted this down into a local .yml file back in 2021, when Muse Group took over and wanted to telemetry-sniff people. I didn't pay attention to audacity past that point.
Also, many accounts on hackernews act very suspiciously, with just raw promo as it if comes from an advertising account. I am noticing this increasingly, where people comment regular news with "this is great!!!!!". That makes no sense.
Yes, but they apparently hired a competent team and listened to user feedback. I don’t think this is astroturfing. Around a year ago they announced their plans for Audacity 4 in an hour-long video and it went somewhat viral, so this is a highly anticipated release.
Anyone who's dealt with ultimate guitar will tell you they're bottom feeding scumbags. At least, 100% of the people I know who've dealt with UG feel that way.
I wouldn't be shocked at all if suspicious comments were bogus. Hell, I'd be shocked if UG wasn't doing something untoward.
They also fucked musescore as well. Evil pigfuckers.
209 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 9.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM
I think this may be the first time I've wanted to buy merch
https://merch.audacityteam.org/
Is there a free open source tool for video editing that has the same UX chops?
36 vs 47MB
Reaper and Pro Tools (and many other DAWs), in contrast, had the source material in one folder and the session file essentially just documented the edits. These small session files could be exported even via email.
The .aup3 format was one of the reasons why I decided to ditch Audacity3 for radio editing back in the day. And, it used to lag heavily when I had a project with several hundred cuts done via "ripple editing". All this was years ago, though.
I concluded that Audacity v1.2.6 was the high point of this software and, indeed, tried to go back into using that one for a while (in 2019 or 2021 or so)! It was fast enough, very simple, young, raw, robust, but it still had its early 2000s open source enthusiasm charm. :)
As a blast from the past, here's a 2002 publication by the original authors of Audacity on the original file format: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/papers/RBD-papers%20renamed/A%20...
I tried the Audacity 4 beta a while ago, and it seemed super clean and like it fixed a lot of stuff. I am pretty concerned about the encroaching audio.com things (even though they are completely optional), but I still think this Audacity version has promise. I especially like how you can drag clips to time-stretch them.
Are you sure this isn't just the typical "clip/crop a sample at the wrong moment, in the middle of a soundwave, and you'll get a pop/click"? This problem happens all across DAWs and hardware samplers and such, usually there is a way to "align to zero-crossings" when you wanna avoid it, or called something similar. I'd be surprised if Audacity didn't have that optionally since before, or that they didn't have it before but now with Audacity 4 it would suddenly be used automatically, that'd be somewhat strange too.
This is the de-facto standard practice for fixing/working around that particular issue, so I don't think it's incorrect at all :) Besides, however you fix an issue and it sounds good, it's correct :)
It looks like a well crafted UI, with care and attention to detail. The kind of thing that takes coordination. Scrum can help with that.
The grandparent poster seemed to be claiming the opposite: that scrum makes such things harder to achieve. That doesn’t match my experience. I think you can make a polished product, or a mess, using any of a variety of coordination technuqies. If anything, the planning technique is orthogonal to the cohesion of the product (although IMO if you do Scrum well, you’ll probably find it easier to coordinate towards a high cohesion product). But Scrum (or any well run system) is not the only factor. At a minimum you need a team who want a high cohesion product; you need some people who can help steer production towards a high-cohesion product; you need to have people on the team willing to have their opinions challenged from time to time; and, if you’ll indulge a little axe-grinding, you need the younger team members to trust the more experienced ones.
Just go the main homepage and there is a banner which leads you to buy the latest plugin
https://www.audacityteam.org/
But hontestly nothing wrong with that imo
> half a dozen forks popped up overnight
There is only one actively maintained fork https://tenacityaudio.org/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
So the guitar tabs website which had then recently acquired Musescore offered him a job. Not just a job, but basically to be boss of the whole thing. Then they bought audacity, staffpad and Hal Leonard too. Then they bought out their private equity backer.
I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up. They haven't enshittified it (from my perspective as a user anyway). It seems in the end these people just loved music more than they loved money.
Just remember bad news sells. I'm reasonably sure there are a number of other cases where this happens, likely most. However they are not big news and not memorable so I can't cite them.
It seems after the Native Instruments fiasco, they (Francisco Partners) just decided to quit music altogether.
Well he said that Sibelius was the best for serious musicians, it just had a horrible UI.
This site is a lot like how I remember ultimate guitar, being that you can look up tabs and access them. I hope people keep uploading more tabs because ultimate still has a larger volume
These days most people just Adobe Podcast Enhance and forget.
Must add that it's so awesome to have an open source Qt based audio editor on KDE Plasma that does not look like shit!
> Many people feel that western notation makes it unnecessarily hard to read music. If we want to sight read, learn music theory or just practice an instrument, surely there's a better way? Right? This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4
Fighting notation is like fighting piano keyboard which is also extremely convenient thing to play compared to other stuff, even to grid controllers.
The only real problem is guitar always has several different ways to play the same notes all over the neck and instrument tuning isn't always specified either.
Standard tuning may not work and tabs sometimes aren't there alongside the staff. If you're trying to sight read, you'll guess alright for a while until you are suddenly forced to make heroic leaps to the other end of the neck or painfully contort your fingers just so you don't miss a beat.
But also, really, I was always taught that unless the composer specifies something specific, you are free to figure it on your own. Like there are only so many contexts where the timbral differences between two unison, fretted notes is going to matter probably, right? Also, how you play some part might be informed by where you are after the preceding part etc.
Tuning point though is kinda interesting and not all my wheel house. But they do call the default one standard for a reason!
With regards to tuning, fingerstyle will often feature an arbitrary tuning unique to only a handful of songs. Timbre absolutely matters because you're playing multiple parts on one fretboard simultaneously.
Use freeform text; it's a standard part of musical notation. Just because most of what you see on a score is some form or another of shorthand doesn't mean everything is.
How do you think Tom Lehrer was able to indicate a tempo of "Pornissimo"?
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/smut-m...
probably a standalone Italian word would be fine, or some special < like we have for gradually increasing volume
Interestingly, the current form of a piano keyboard isn't only way keyed instruments have been laid out.
My mind was blown when I first saw a harpsichord with separate flat and sharp keys for example because I never considered the concept. I grew up with pianos so in my ignorance I never really thought about them being different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_sharp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard
With regard to the piano keyboard, again not terrible, but it definitely is a compromise to fit the mechanical needs of the piano. I really like the design of the chromatic keyboard(ever see an accordion with the big hex grid of buttons, this is a chromatic keyboard), it has the advantage that whatever key you play a song in it has the same fingering, on a piano every key has different fingering, so there is a big skill barrier to changing keys that interferes with employment of such a critical aspect of playing.
Ultimately standard notation is still the best we have.
The answer to why people don't use a chromatic scale is also in there. Very roughy, it's harder to sight read intervals between notes.
Standard music notation is a like a London Underground map, it's symbolic rather than literal.
Being more symbolic gives standard notation many advantages once you learn it.
The video does a much better job of explaining that than I've given. It really is very good.
For example, if you number the tones and have a piano style instrument with alternating white and black keys, then you can have a 6 line stave where spaces are always white keys and black keys are always lines.
When sight reading chords pianists, for example, don't really think about every note in the chord.
Instead if you recognise the intervals between the notes and the root you can just place your hand without thinking about it too much.
Since most of the time you're in a single musical key you don't need see every tone separately. You can still flatten, sharpen or normal and you can represent key changes too.
There are other details such as beginners often already using numbers to indicate preferred fingering.
I'm sure there would be workarounds but there's a lot of edge case that standard notation already supports.
Many people have tried to replace standard notation, over several hundred years, and no one has yet come up with a compelling alternative. So it's probably a very difficult task.
If you're really serious about proposing an alternative I would probably start by considering why other competing systems have failed.
I'm not really serious about replacing it, more like writing your own OS: it's fun to do and you get a better understanding of why the existing systems work.
I learned to read sheet music as a kid by my mom taking me to piano lessons. I cannot play the piano but I know where the notes are that correspond to the sheet music. I parlayed that into learning to play woodwinds when I got older. Even that was just enough to have fun. Nothing about it was me being serious about being a musician. So when other students would talk about 5ths and 3rds, I was totally lost. Then someone just said transpose the note up/down 5 notes (or 3 or whatever). They said it confidently, and they were first chair, so I went with it. I've never needed to know it, as I just play the notes as written on the sheet. I've never gigged where I had to play different keys.
But yeah, the fifth nomenclature confused the hell out of me too
*7 note system
It's called an "octave" because the 8th note is considered another instance of the 1st.
The problem with linnstrument and similar things is exactly equality of any note, it's not easy to think like "ok, here we move to another key, so we have to add one sharp here" on a controller like that. For me, even on a guitar I have to "see" the notes to play well and understand what I'm playing, so I had to learn "white keys" on the fretboard, and on top of that, learn octave numbers for each note, only then it really works for me and it's still hard compared to the keyboard where you see all sharps and flats and can treat them as you like. That's more important than using the same muscle memory imo
The majority of music uses a system of intervals called the major scale, which is seven notes with a particular spacing that is determined largely by psychoacoustics (that is, we didn’t just make it up). That spacing can be shifted around to any point on the underlying 12-note system, which gives different keys/modes. On any single piece of music you’re typically using only one of those, so those seven notes are the “skeleton” underlying it all. This is what it means to say “this piece is in D major”. (BTW, a fifth is the fifth note in the major scale, so yes, there is a 5!)
Standard notation privileges these modes of the major scale, which means (assuming you know how to play all the major scales on your instrument) there’s a 1:1 mapping from places on the staff to scale degrees. That means most of the time you’re reading straight off the score into the scale your fingers have memorized.
The key signature is what makes this work. You can even instantly transpose by ignoring the written key signature and reading in another key. Chords are also made readable because they’re usually based on thirds, which happens to be the interval that makes the notes stack up exactly next to each other, so a triad, seventh chord, etc. is instantly recognizable.
So basically the notation is optimized for the common case (the music is using notes from a mode of the major scale) and makes exceptions (accidentals) stand out.
And yes, pianos are a pain because all the (musical) keys are different on the (physical) keys. However, pianos are great because all the octaves look exactly alike (so finding all the Ds on the keyboard is trivial). Stringed instruments like guitars or violins are the opposite: all the (musical) key fingerings are the same, but you have to memorize the positions of all the notes because they all look the same. Pick your poison.
In fact, this is true for all diatonic scales, which are the foundation of Western music and have been for centuries. The major scale is just the ionic, the minor is the aeolian. There’s also dorian, phrygian, lydian, etc., and all of these are in active use in popular music.
(Shout-out to our often overlooked friend, the lochrian scale. IYKYK. Practically unheard outside of Gregorian chants and metal.)
Actually the parallel minor does not share the key signature with the major; it is simply the minor with the same tonic.
The _relative_ minor shares the key signature with its major; and its tonic pitch is a minor third lower.
guitar is a percussion instrument :D
The transition from absolute to relative pitch is like moving from basic arithmetic to algebra, once it clicks. Except that relative pitch is way easier to understand without notation, pick a reference and go from there.
fifth (ordinal), not fifth (fraction).
Interestingly this is a strong thing to fight because there are pieces of music that are physically inaccessible to many players, particularly people with hands not wide enough for the intervals. No amount of practice or stretching can overcome it and you can't exactly travel with a piano or keyboard everywhere.
There some cool things like the Janko keyboard that seem strictly superior to the traditional 12 keys but it's kind of an uphill fight to build conversion kits cheap and light and good enough to travel and perform with.
Written music involves a symbiosis between the composer and the performer. You have to find people who are willing to do both of those jobs, in sufficient number to make performances happen. If you choose a new or idiosyncratic notation system, nobody will play your stuff.
In the future one could imagine automating the process of converting from one notation to another. But a lot of sheet music is still not in computer readable form. From what I've read, OCR'ing sheet music is still an unsolved problem.
- Reason (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PFRyONURSo)
- Sibelius (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI)
- MuseScore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A)
- Dorico (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8)
Invert the instrument track in Audacity and align the waveform and it acts as a crude noise (instrument) cancellation and that leaves you with vocal track.
Not perfect since some instruments can still be heard faintly but sufficient enough for my needs back then.
Still a good move, and everyone wins!
Audacity has never felt particularly native-feeling to me, and I don't buy the McDonalds analogy - this release is still lightweight. It'd be a fair comment if they'd e.g. move to Electron, but Qt 6 is hardly that.
Your perspective is also valid, in that it could be phrased a little kinder. =3
Audacity was fooling no one that it was a native MacOS app, or even a particularly well designed GTK app. The fundamental idea of WX is not sound. Turns out MFC is not a great abstraction for AppKit.
Even Qt uses some higher level native UI interfaces on its respective implementations.
The only toolkit to do what it does? Qt does what it does, even if the approach is not the same (arguably superior), there’s also Tk. There’s also libui and IUP.
gimp had the same issue and i wouldnt be surprised if you also miss the old GTK UI?
making audacity feel like a modern app instead of a dusty relic isnt making it into McDonalds..
I for one applaud this upgrade -- its the polish it should have had years ago
God forbid someone actually improves a software!
On windows 11, Qt is usually fine if the license is still compatible... The old wxWidgets supports native OS interface targeting being truly cross-platform.
Like all eye-candy interfaces at Microsoft, it will work until it doesn't. =3
Discord is the right platform to get feedback from normies.
But it used wxWidgets, so by definition, NOT native interface
Here's an alternative for those unaware:
https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity
This way, even if they had telemetry, I wouldn't really care.
I always thought audacity was great, and still prefer its workflow to slow tools or logic. I haven’t ever tried Reaper however.
On MacOS it is probably one of the better options for lossless workflows. =3
Time Tracks Note/MIDI tracks Mixer Macro Manager and the scripting pipe VAMP and LADSPA plugin hosting Play-at-speed Sync-Lock and the old tool modes were replaced by the workflows described above.
>>Additionally, Audacity 4 ships with some missing exporting and rendering features, analyzers, and effects.
FWIW I don't think I've used a v1 LADSPA plugin for a decade.
If you want a local cloud, save things to your computer or NAS. You do know how to do that, right?
No need to mindlessly slop code something.
P.S.: I don't care for looks, but UX seems better. I will try it.
I noted this down into a local .yml file back in 2021, when Muse Group took over and wanted to telemetry-sniff people. I didn't pay attention to audacity past that point.
Also, many accounts on hackernews act very suspiciously, with just raw promo as it if comes from an advertising account. I am noticing this increasingly, where people comment regular news with "this is great!!!!!". That makes no sense.
I wouldn't be shocked at all if suspicious comments were bogus. Hell, I'd be shocked if UG wasn't doing something untoward.
They also fucked musescore as well. Evil pigfuckers.