I’ve been using Audacity with PulseAudio for quite a while now and it works fine for me. I sometimes find myself tweaking volumes in PulseAudio on the side.
Late reply, but yes. You can mix and match to record from Pulse but playback to ALSA too (or the other way around) but I think using Pulse for both makes more sense.
I’d be happy if I could just “hide” a section of audio without needing to delete it. I’m often trying to shorten musical pieces and having a way to hide/unhide a section would be so much easier than relying on delete/undo.
Ah, I think that isn’t possible. You would have to split the track and then use the smart clips feature. Or you use a different tool like someone else mentioned.
So - lets say I’m taking a long piece of music and making something like a “radio edit”.
I decide a chorus can go, maybe the another section, perhaps a repeated phrase here or there. But now it’s too short so I want to put that chorus back in. Or change how much of the chorus was removed since I removed too much.
There isn’t an easy way to undo that delete without ctrl+z’ing my way back through all my deletes. I want something like a “hide column” feature from spreadsheets where I can just skip over that section but not really delete it. And to have a marker so I can undo it and change it later.
Might be a niche request but it’s something I need to do from time-to-time.
Pricing doesn’t look that bad $2.99/month for 250GB ($0.01196/GB) but bit of a jump to $14.99/month for 2TB ($0.007495/GB), real lack of middle ground there though. I think it is US dollars (hate how websites don’t tell you). Since Audacity is open source it should be possible to create an identical API to the audio.com one for custom storage.
One of the weirdest things I’ve noticed with Audacity is the file size of the projects. I have a project with 7 3-minute tracks and maybe 100 edits, and the file size is 6GB! Are the file sizes so large so that they can more easily upsell cloud storage?
Maybe they store the tracks in an uncompressed format to preserve quality. But you’d probably want to only use it for active projects to avoid the hike. Though there is potentially a conflict of interest there - as with any project that offers cloud storage. You’d have to see if a patch to reduce the file size would be accepted or not
It’s still going but I think a good chunk of the FOSS community avoids it. Distros that still ships it disable the telemetry.
Definitely feels like the desperate attempts to monetize it, and the enshittification that typically arises next.
As far as I know it’s still fine to use if your distro disables the telemetry, which is what most people had issues with. It’s still under the same license in the end, which is probably why they’re now pivoting to cloud features: that they can make proprietary. I’m sure cloud-based AI plugins are next.
Aww I was just about gush about how awesome they’ve been all these years. Guess I haven’t really kept up to date. I mean it doesn’t sound like it’s gone totally to shit, but just clearly embarking on a path straight in to the shit
Gentoo specifically switches off the telemetry (-Daudacity_has_sentry_reporting=off,-Daudacity_has_crashreports=off). The cloud saving facility is also off by default, but can be added to the build by enabling the audiocom USE flag.
I don’t know a whole lot about what Audacity is up to these days, but the same company owns MuseScore, and it sounds like they’re doing kinda similar things in terms of monetisation. The core software itself is still free, but there are optional cloud services on top of that which you can pay for.
I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Cloud services provide a convenience. Some people like that convenience and are willing to pay for it. Others might be perfectly ok doing it themselves and won’t pay.
It helps that the new head of design for both of these products is a guy who really knows his shit. He’s already taken MuseScore from an application that nobody in their right mind would use if they could afford the commercial competitors, to a legitimately great music engraving application, and he’s been on Audacity too since 2021.
The problem lies in the fact that these services are completely proprietary and are an example of service as a software substitute.
Foss should encourage privacy and freedom. Cloud storage doesn’t normally do that. What’s worse it it often requires non free libraries to be included which is a no no
It’s free software so you can get rid of it if you want. It’s not really for the users of a free software project to dictate the direction the project should take, perhaps unless they have made substantial contributions
It helps that the new head of design for both of these products is a guy who really knows his shit. He’s already taken MuseScore from an application that nobody in their right mind would use if they could afford the commercial competitors, to a legitimately great music engraving application, and he’s been on Audacity too since 2021.
I tried Audacity before that and couldn’t migrate from adobe’s aquired CoolEditPro (Au versions before modern redesign). Have it changed much since then? I’m yet to find an alternative (video editing tools just doesn’t make it, although they get recommended) and as I can recall Audacity had an interface that’s not as easy to use.
I couldn’t tell you for sure, because I don’t use it or its commercial competition very much. That said, personally when I have needed to use it, I’ve always found the gap between Audacity and its pro equivalents in terms of basic usability to be much lower than in other creative fields. GIMP, in particular, is nigh unusable compared to Photoshop.
Audacity doesn’t come anywhere close to professional DAWs like Audition and it’s not really trying to be one afaik. Ardour is the way to go for professional needs.
They attempted to add opt-in telemetry a few years ago and people lost their shit for some reason. They didn’t merge it, but the FOSS community’s “fork first ask questions later” attitude kicked in anyway and multiple forks popped up while now the original project has permanently been labelled as spyware, which is fun. Fun fact, KDE Plasma actually has opt-in telemetry. Dolphin, Kate and a few kdepim apps also do. Plasma also has opt-in automated crash reporting, which is particularly evil. Y’all better uninstall them right now. I mean, what if you accidentally opted in, or something? Anyway, not a fan of hostile forks unless someone can actually prove the original project has gone to shit.
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