Agreed. UX designers are a rare breed in open source, and Tantacrul is a treasure - as is Audacity. I'm also hopeful of the approach. The video is already very respectful of the existing work, UI, and workflows, which is promising.

Not enough people appreciate how stable, reliable, and battle-tested Audacity is as an audio production tool. The fact that it's free software only magnifies its usefulness within the audio space.

In a former job capacity, I personally oversaw a group of >40,000 individuals all over the globe, who relied on Audacity to make a living. With Tantacrul on the UX side of things, my hope is that nothing too radical is done to negate the expectations of these users, as many of them are not tech-savvy and learning a new interface for them is basically the same as learning a new tool altogether.

Audacity has a lot of low hanging fruits in the UX department. E.g. every single one of these "You have not selected anything to apply [feature X] to. Try pressing Ctrl+A to select everything and try again!" dialogs should just not exist (if nothing is selected, apply to all, done), or when exporting to a format which doesn't do separate tracks and there are multiple tracks in the same channel, Audacity just silently merges them (throwing away data). When recording while a track exists there's some way (outside of punch-and-roll, I think) to have it record into the same track again with no warning, throwing away data. Scrolling is vertical for some reason, even though horizontal scroll is the primary scrolling timelines.

I do not think you will be seeing any sweeping revamp if that is what you're concerned about. Tantacrul is really focused on smoothing pain points and removing ambiguity. The changes we have seen from him in MuseScore so far have been small but welcome.

Would you mind sharing what's the company/project? It seems very interesting.

In a past life I was the head of audio production for the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), Audible.com's online production service for independent authors and narrators. My job was to help ensure success for the at-home narrators who had DIY recording rigs setup at their home office.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing.

While I am sure Tantacrul will do a great job, as seen by his interest in learning more about the history and existing user base of the software first, I do want to disagree in a more general way.

Personally I hate UI changes and I want Audacity to change as little as possible in that regard. It is not a tool that I use regularly so I want to be able to not use it for a year or two, get back to it and still find the same familiar interface.

That is not to say that there are not many sensible changes that could be and maybe should be made to Audacity. I am just saying that stability is far more valuable for me. I rather wish for more stability in software than better UI.

> Personally I hate UI changes and I want Audacity to change as little as possible in that regard. It is not a tool that I use regularly so I want to be able to not use it for a year or two, get back to it and still find the same familiar interface.

And here is the beauty of non-web based software, you can guarantee that you always will! Same executable on your computer represents the same program launched, forever. Things don't change under the hood without you saying "yes", so if you want the UI to remain the same forever, you're welcome to. If you later want to upgrade, you can, but you'll never be forced to.

That would only work if I never wanted to change or update my system.

In practice, especially on Linux, binaries only work for specific distributions of specific major versions. It can be very difficult to get a binary to work a few years down the line.

Of course solutions like Appimage help quite a bit as software comes with most dependencies packaged inside but even then its not perfect. It will slow down the bit rot but not stop it.

In practice, on Windows, one can still use most things made 25 years ago. In actuality, I still use WinAmp 2.91 marked "Apr 16 2003" in the about screen. See also http://www.oldversion.com/ .

It's pretty simple to build audacity. If you're never upgrading then that's fine.

In theory, flatpaks will have perfect forwards compatibility, unless some breaking changed occur without them supporting the old format in a legacy way, which seems unlikely.

Except that "just don't upgrade" is a very bad idea.

Why?

Security patches, for one thing, right?

Genuine question: what security vulnerabilities could Audacity have that would make not upgrading a risk?

Many, many, MANY audio players have had exploitable buffer overflows.

But Audacity right now does everything you need and you are not processing untrusted source files, so why would you ever need to update?

On the other hand, lots of people encounter Audacity maybe for the first time and the UI might be unappealing or confusing.

I think there is space for both you who wants an "eternal" tool and the new user who might want something more apporachable.

There are many reasons why one would like to update Audacity also if it already does everything one needs, for example increased robustness and speed in newer versions if they provide it, and also new effects that simplify existing workflows.

Also compatibility with future hardware, aka bitrot.

Having seen many of his videos, I agree with you. Not that I'm against it, but under tantacrul, Audacity will likely become nearly unrecognizable. Many of us have a huge investment in the present, imperfect system. We should admit upfront this is a fork, and a separate maintenance effort for Audacity classic will be a separate project.

It's great news! The little playful jab on the magnifying glasses suggests we could see some great UI/UX fixes.