How we are building Audacity 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38

by brudgers • 10 months ago

159 32 10 months ago

n0ot• 10 months ago

I know accessibility for low vision users was mentioned, but I wonder, with all these changes, whether version 4 will be accessible to screen reader users, and if so, whether any major features will nevertheless remain inaccessible.

brudgers10• 10 months ago

I would guess accessibility will be similar to the current version of MuseScore since the same company (Muse Group) is leading both open source projects. So maybe look at MuseScore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_Group

zduoduo• 10 months ago

Nice update — hope it rolls out smoothly.

Tantacrul2• 10 months ago

We're using the framework my team on MuseScore Studio created for the UI in Audacity. This allows us to port over the significant amount of screen reader support we built over there too.

We'll need to spend time making sure it's applying correctly to every corner of the app - but when it's done, the app will be far more broadly supported than V3.

drzaiusx11• 10 months ago

Is it still controlled by the Russian WSM Group? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728784

asddubs2• 10 months ago

The video addresses this and claims it's not.

brudgers10• 10 months ago

The code is GPL.

https://github.com/audacity/audacity

The application privacy policy is here

https://www.audacityteam.org/desktop-privacy-notice/

knowitnone33• 10 months ago

GPL doesn't guarantee you security in any way, shape, or form nor is a privacy policy.

totetsu2• 10 months ago

The privacy policy now reads For the purposes of this Notice, MuseCY SM Ltd., a Cyprus company with an address at Spyrou Kyprianou, 84, 4004, Limassol, Cyprus (“Audacity Team“, “us“, “we“, or “our“) acts as the data controller for the personal information that is collected via the App and through the use of the App, as further outlined in section 2 (“personal information”). As a data controller, the Audacity Team makes sure that any processing of your personal information complies with applicable data protection law, and specifically with the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”).

kennyadam• 10 months ago

I don’t know when it happened, but earlier in the week a non-tech member of staff, who was trying to install Audacity, called me really confused because it was asking about installing and then saving to some sort of cloud storage that was being pushed during the installation process. I personally haven’t used Audacity for a couple of years, so the cloud storage stuff added in 2024 is new to me showing up during install. It appeared again in the choice of save locations even after rejecting it during install and I have no interest in someone calling me in two years asking where their files are after the cloud storage shuts down or gets paywalled. For 95% of casual users looking to just split/combine/trim/etc some basic audio files, I’m just gonna tell them to use Ocenaudio.

brudgers10• 10 months ago

I think Musehub.com is a sister project within Muse Group that helps mitigate the cost of paying professional developers to work on Audacity and MuseScore.

In the case of Muse Score it also provides a marketplace for third parties.

I don’t use it but I can see why it exists…ordinary folks expect cloud services these days. And if I had a different use case, it would help me get stuff done.

But for what it’s worth with Audacity I don’t see it pop up as a location on my computer.

ldng• 10 months ago

Yes. And ?

A lot of projects propose cloud storage without trying to force it on you. More the How than the What which is questionable here.

totetsu2• 10 months ago

There were some forks of the original at the time that are still simple like https://tenacityaudio.org/ but I'm not sure how healthy any of them are.

stevoski• 10 months ago

These videos by Tantacrul are sooooo good to watch, from the perspective of making product decisions for a software product. They are really well made, too

jbreckmckye• 10 months ago

The video mentions being able to move from wxWidgets to Qt.

As someone who's never worked with either (only web UIs), I thought this would be a good chance to understand: why is wx bad, what makes Qt good?

brudgers10• 10 months ago

I don’t think it is good/bad.

More, what is better for this specific project at this point in time given the objectives…it’s just an engineering judgement.

WXwidgits got Audacity through twenty odd years of intense development and helped millions of users.

asddubs2• 10 months ago

having worked with wxwidgets only a tiny bit, things simply don't look or even work the same across operating systems with wxwidgets. It tries to use native widgets wherever possible, but that also means things behave slightly differently across systems, and if the toolkit doesn't provide a matching widget, it sometimes just uses the next best thing. All this also makes it rather hard to style things in a way that looks good. It's good for simple applications but you run into the limitations quickly if you actually try to use it cross-platform in my limited experience.

How we are building Audacity 4

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