The corruption of Audacity

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nils
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The corruption of Audacity

Post by nils »

This request provides the basic telemetry for Audacity.
...
Universal Google Analytics is used to track the following events:
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835
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sunrat
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by sunrat »

Wow, that's ugly. sunrat checks to see if it's April Fools day.
An open-source software project trusting Google and expecting its users to trust Google is naive and stupid.
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LAM
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by LAM »

Not only to Google, but to Yandex too, par condicio. :lol:

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Largos
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by Largos »

Telemetry is nonsense and the arguments for it are ridiculous.
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by merlyn »

Audacity what got into you?

WTF is going on with it? OK, so I was willing to tolerate the hideous UI, the fact that the JACK implementation is shit, and the fact it causes xruns if you do ... well, anything really because it was open source.

Time for a fork? nilshi -- you're the forkmeister. :lol:
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by nils »

merlyn wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 3:49 pm Time for a fork? nilshi -- you're the forkmeister. :lol:
I shall name it... Newdacity.! Or Nude-a-City? GNU/Acity ? So many choices...
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Loki Harfagr
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by Loki Harfagr »

@nilshi
maybe "Not A Seedy" would fit?
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by Basslint »

To clarify: libre software itself can never be corrupted. Anybody can fork it and remove the bad features. What was damaged was the Audacity trademark. I assume if Muse group doesn't drop the program because of all this bad PR, they will eventually sneak the telemetry at the very least in the Windows version, which I personally believe to be the most used version (because the 1% of Windows users is likely bigger than the 30% of GNU/Linux users).

Nothing happened to the "soul" of Audacity: it will probably live on in a fork.
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by bhilmers »

merlyn wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 3:49 pmOK, so I was willing to tolerate the hideous UI, the fact that the JACK implementation is shit, and the fact it causes xruns if you do ... well, anything really because it was open source.
I get the feeling most of us have always "tolerated" Audacity and the fact that after all this time it never grew into a high quality tool. It's still not as good as Sound Forge 5, which is 20 years old. I only use Audacity for the most basic recording and trimming of audio (LOL @ the envelope editor). Anything else I'll turn to Ocenaudio or Windows binaries like Wavosaur. I get that Audacity's new management is aiming to fix all these obvious issues, but I don't have any attachment to this program and will gladly use something else to be free of Google's stink, heh.

And let's be real of this talk of forking it. Not going to happen, ever. Anyone who would be interested in working on an audio editor is probably already contributing to a project like this already.
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by tux99 »

Forking doesn't have to mean completely separate development, it can simply mean releasing audacity under a different name with the tracking code removed.

I wouldn't even mind the telemetry as long as it doesn't involve third parties like Google or Yandex, i.e. it should go directly and exclusively to the audacity servers (which shouldn't be hosted by google or yandex or any other data collection company).
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by GMaq »

bhilmers wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 6:26 pm
merlyn wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 3:49 pmOK, so I was willing to tolerate the hideous UI, the fact that the JACK implementation is shit, and the fact it causes xruns if you do ... well, anything really because it was open source.
I get the feeling most of us have always "tolerated" Audacity and the fact that after all this time it never grew into a high quality tool. It's still not as good as Sound Forge 5, which is 20 years old. I only use Audacity for the most basic recording and trimming of audio (LOL @ the envelope editor). Anything else I'll turn to Ocenaudio or Windows binaries like Wavosaur. I get that Audacity's new management is aiming to fix all these obvious issues, but I don't have any attachment to this program and will gladly use something else to be free of Google's stink, heh.

And let's be real of this talk of forking it. Not going to happen, ever. Anyone who would be interested in working on an audio editor is probably already contributing to a project like this already.
Agree +1

Still using Steinberg WaveLab in Wine occasionally (also 15 years old or so), or these days most of the time I just use Ardour... yes it's far too 'good' to use as a soundfile editor but stuff like realtime processing with the plugins and non-destructive editing of the source is pretty nice to work with vs. pretty much any soundfile editor...
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by merlyn »

bhilmers wrote:Not going to happen, ever. Anyone who would be interested in working on an audio editor is probably already contributing to a project like this already.
I know you're familiar with logical fallacies and while I don't see an obvious one here it is a weak argument. You've heard of black swans I take it?
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by TAERSH »


Sony Soundforge Audio Studio 9, Wine, Bionic64.

SonySoundforge-AudioStudio9-Wine-Bionic.jpg
SonySoundforge-AudioStudio9-Wine-Bionic.jpg (146.19 KiB) Viewed 17663 times
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LAM
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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by LAM »

Not nearly as powerful, but for fast edits could be a good alternative:
https://audiomass.co/
https://github.com/pkalogiros/audiomass

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Re: The corruption of Audacity

Post by j_e_f_f_g »

Agreed wrt Audacity being a rather poor audio editing tool.

Ocenaudio is without a doubt the best Linux audio file editing app, and it's the only one I'll use on Linux. It properly does zooming on both the X (time) and Y (amplitude) axis, which is essential for accurate cut and paste, trimming, etc. Zooming only on X axis (like Audacity) is worthless.

It just needs a good amplitude envelope shaping feature, and a (50%) crossfade algorithm, to be usable for creating looped waveforms.

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