Spyke
opensource·Open SourcebyBlisterexe

Audacity 4 will be a full UI overhaul apparently.

Good video, very much worth watching despite the length. New UI will look something like this:

with an option for a more classic look.

Looks like an enourmous UX improvement too, and a rewrite to QT and eliminating a lot of technical debt will make development faster.

View original on lemmy.zip
piefed.social

Full UI overhaul?! I can't believe they had the audacity to do this!

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I'm not criticising. I just wanted to play with the word audacity

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lemmy.world

Tenacity has replaced this years ago. Fuck around, find out!

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Aatubereply
kbin.melroy.org

they backtracked on the privacy policy and said they had really overzealous lawyers that they somehow mistrusted lawyers doing so "out of an abundance of caution" so i'm still giving them one final chance here since that issue was resolved rather quickly (within two weeks, which is why i'm not absolving them and giving them a chance, but it's been uneventful since 2021 so i think that strike's gonna expire in a year)

and i don't think the telemetry was every an issue since it was always going to be opt-in

tenacity does not have the rally useful beats and measures feature for some reason

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lemmy.blahaj.zone

if the concern is just about telemetry, I seriously wonder why Tenacity isn’t just a soft fork of Audacity, like VSCodium is to VS code, or Librewolf to Firefox.

that way you get the best of both worlds, the amazing new features in Audacity, without the worry of corporate control

14

Because then you're just describing Audacity. The concerning feature has to be intentionally activated by the user. And if you download and build it yourself then that part of the code isn't even accessible. You have to modify the code to activate it before you build it. I'm actually glad with the way they handled it. They listen to the user base and if you follow tantacrul he regularly consults changes with the users.

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telemetry and a reverted privacy policy change that lost some goodwill, but i agree

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Olapreply
lemmy.world

They also pissed off a lot of contributors and community members. Tenacity for me!

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LiveLMreply
lemmy.zip

And what exactly does Tenacity bring to the table other than a name replace across the code-base?

The non-destructive editing and realtime effects alone are a huge jump in capability between the current and old versions of Audacity, and that's before we even discuss UI improvements

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Zagorathreply
aussie.zone

From what I could tell when I looked into it after a comment someone left on ![email protected], some people were very upset at the privacy implications of Audacity adding an update detection mechanism (which can be turned off, and which is not included at all in the default build if you build it yourself).

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lemmy.world

Are people are actually upset about an auto update feature? A feature that has been pretty standard in programs for a very long time?

I understood some of the upset when they added telemetry, but auto-update?

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Not even auto-update. Just auto detect updates. Then you go and download it yourself manually.

Auto-update-detection meant that the software was calling out to a remote server, so they updated the TOS to reflect that, and people got upset.

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Blisterexereply
lemmy.zip

afaik most distros and flathub package it without that for obvious reasons

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(for package management, not weird concerns like “they’re adding an entire http library to audacity for this so they must be in the process of using it for something else”)

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Olapreply
lemmy.world

Ardour is milea ahead on all that anyway. Tenacity is a simple multi-channel recorder. That's all it needs to be

2

Hard agree! It fills a really specific use case, for ease of use, relatively simple projects (though like any simple tech, artists gonna art and make something massive lol).

Aurduor and the like (I jumped over to Reaper) are truly excellent options for more intense projects.

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discuss.tchncs.de

Now when will Gimp get the same treatment... I know some people like it but I just can't. I'd rather use Affinity Photo via proton a custom wine version (ElementalWarriorWine)

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TruePe4rlreply
lemmy.ml

I usually go with Krita. Not because of the UI, i just learnt to use it first and like it. Or Inkscape for vector graphics.

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Krita I tried for while, but I've been spoiled by Affinity Photo's selection tool. Can't use path tool or magic wand anymore

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Krudlerreply
lemmy.world

Gimp is a misbegotten, irredeemable piece of UI trash. The fact that it's been around this long and gets egregiously worse with each iteration is baffling to me.

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balsoftreply
lemmy.ml

I mean, it in a very literal way the parent project of GTK, and therefore indirectly responsible for GNOME, so that kind of checks out. I use it quite often though, and you can learn it to do what you wanna do.

1

Hey I don't want to come off the wrong way, couple decades ago gimp was very useful to me, when I was trapped in a company that wouldn't pay a penny for any kind of software, and on the FOSS side of things choices for imaging applications were sparse at best. Gimp was a lifesaver at times.

But it always been an interface disaster. I spent decades doing UI/X alongside other development, and gimp has always been a piece of shit designed by a programmer with the toxic "what it works" mentally.

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P13reply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Ah, didn’t know it worked with Proton!

I have an Affinity license that’s just been collecting dust while I use the Photopea web app.

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lemmy.world

It's looking freaking gorgeous. Tentacrul is the bomb. His work on MuseScore is arguably the best UX/UI in the FOSS world. It even beats most if not all of the proprietary alternatives in the same category.

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He also did a great tribute video to Tim Smith / Cardiacs. Was already in my good books, went beyond with that one.

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j5906reply
feddit.org

I actually like FreeCAD and its UI a lot and the recent improvements are huge! Yes it has its quirks but for a tool as versatile as FreeCAD they are acceptable.

1

It's definitely improving! I hope they also improve the default shortcuts because having to reach to almost the last key on the other side of the keyboard (k) for the single most used constraint is pretty nuts while there are almost unused closer keys lol.

1
suppo.fi

Watched last weekend. Not a huge fan of the rebrand, but the changes that actually count look great.

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clb92reply
feddit.dk

Yeah, the branding is definitely 'meh' at best, but even worse, in my opinion, is the tight integration with the whole Muse ecosystem and MuseHub thing (and the default download on the website being the MuseHub-based installer too) and built-in cloud storage crap. It just feels wrong to have an open source application integrated so tightly into all their proprietary services all the way through. Just installed the latest version 3.7.5, and I was surprised at how much nagging there was, on both the website and in the application itself.

But other than the whole Muse stuff, Audacity 4.0 looks really awesome in terms of UI and UX. And at least there is a non-MuseHub installer and you can choose not to use their other stuff, and say no to the telemetry...

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Frankly, since it's still open source, I'm ok with it since it also means developpement is much faster, and you can avoid it. At least for me when I installed it on linux through the app store, I didn't notice any of your complaints.

As someone with no attachement to the previous branding I quite like the new branding though, fits the new vibe of the app quite well.

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Aatubereply
kbin.melroy.org

i've never had noticeable lag in audacity besides a niche crash that got fixed. though the cloud storage thing never ever worked for me. it's nice though and you still save locally instead of to cloud by default. plusi think the musehub thing is kinda explainable with the proprietary effects marketplace they added to musehub, and it's not like audacity plugins were always foss anyways

3

i've never had noticeable lag

I think you misread 'nagging' as 'lagging' in my comment

3

Holy shit yes. Also while we’re at it please guys add an option to put the timeline in just seconds instead of minutes:seconds

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lemmy.ml

They are adding “AI” features in a collaboration with Intel, but luckily they’re minor additions like ML based noise reduction

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In other words tasks that "AI" is actually good for, not attempting to generate your music or apply some kind of "magic filter".

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He made a comment in the video that people have been running versions of audacity that have not been updated in 10 years. I went and had a look at the version I had installed. Yep.

I actually assumed it did have an auto update feature and they're just wasn't any updates.

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All the changes seem awesome, looking forward to trying out version 4

7

I've long been hoping for a FOSS alternative to Garage Band. I think LMMS is the closest but it lacks live music recording, its UI is miserable, and the last release was 2020. It would be great if someone could merge Audacity and LMMS.

This is pretty high on my list of coding projects that I would support if I didn't need to spend most of my time serving capital.

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I remember that there was an issue with mainline audicity, like they put malware in it or something? And that’s why it was forked?

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They had to give us something for all that telemetry to keep their entirely educated and tech savy user base on board. 🙄

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