Audacity 4.0.0 Released
76 points by rcalixte
76 points by rcalixte
I've been waiting for this for a long time. Every time I've had to use Audacity (which is a minimum of once every two weeks) it really felt like fighting with an application from 2005 so I'm really looking forward to trying out this new release.
I thought I had a flag about not using Audacity in my head but couldn't remember why.
https://fosspost.org/audacity-developers-apologize-revise-controversial-privacy-policy/
Allow me to recommend Tenacity, whose developers are awesome, for a non-corporate alternative. It was originally an Audacity fork but is now its own thing, and has been around for several years already.
I think the missing features are a poor trade for the small gain of wx -> Qt. While I could easily understand starting a new project on Qt instead of wx, moving a working one from wx to Qt is something of a head scratcher for me.
You should look at Tantacrul's video explaining the reasoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
In short, wx was making it very hard to fix Audacity's many, many UI quirks, and just generally looks rather dated (and this does matter for the perception of open source!) I wouldn't say the new UI is a "small gain", it looks completely different and seems to fix basically all of the UX issues that they had.
This release reminds me of Blender's 2.8 release, when they completely redesigned their UI and considerably improved the UX. I feel like it was a major turning point for them and got rid of a lot of excuses to use proprietary software. Here's hoping the same can happen for Audacity.
Fair enough. I'm certainly calling it "small" before I've used it, and as a person who thought the old UI was fine.
I hope it works well for them!
What I've gather from Tantacrul's video is that wx is at odds with their goal of an identical UI across OSes. It has been a goal for wx to look native on each platform but that ship has actually sailed (and I would say it actually never existed, it was only a belief while people roughly asked for "looks like windows"). Therefore, the switch makes sense to me .
Unfortunately, native OS controls generally cannot be made to look good in UI-dense creative applications.
This release reminds me of Blender's 2.8 release, when they completely redesigned their UI and considerably improved the UX.
But the 2.8 UI is very similar to the 2.79. Blender is in fact a story of gradual improvement.
I think it was more a matter of changing key bindings and where things were than a redesign (blender now looks much the same as it did in 2.79), though I don’t remember much of the details. I remember I had tried learning blender pre-2.8 and it was much harder than after.
There's a lot of really excellent new editing workflow improvements in here from my point of view. For me the visual UI changes are relatively minor, though the preview videos did say that some of the improvements would not have been possible in wx.
Audacity is my go-to tool for messing around with audio. Very excited to try out this release!
The video on why / how they redesign it is very very interesting, especially from a product and software engineering pov. No easy feat: