Audacity took my audio production skills to the next level

[GMaq]

I am looking forward to Audacity 4. Reportedly it has a new Qt UI to replace the clunky wxWidgets of old.
It will be a long wait though. I tried the latest pre-alpha today and it looks promising but is definitely not ready. It does play a .wav file but many of the menu items and actions are not functional yet. The numbers on the timeline are now visible on my 4K monitor whereas they were always tiny before; this was my main complaint about previous versions.

Wow that is interesting for sure! I do like a lot of the new features, I don't like how hard they (the Muse group) keeping flogging the whole cloud thing (such a Microsoft influenced feature). I hope in v4 you can still opt out of the cloud if your don't want it. All of this AI scraping bullshit really makes me want to run screaming for the hills when it comes to cloud storage of any personal files, even just general Audio work, how this stuff is all going on without people's explicit permission is absolutely criminal.

Although Ardour is overkill as a Soundfile editor it eats Audacity's lunch even just for that..

[Audiojunkie]

No, not beyond 4k. But I use a Lenovo 2-in-1 with a 12 inch 4k screen. Anything less than 200% is too small for me.

Haha, gotcha! Wow that is a small screen for 4K! Mine is 28" (I use a Desktop PC 90% of the time) I don't think even at 2x scaling I could use 4K on a laptop... My Thinkpad at 1920x1080 is small enough. I now fully understand you taking the Plugin developers to task about scalable UI's..

Yep. I like high quality crystal clear screens. But if they are small, then the gui must scale up to be usable.

[bulevardi]

As a hobby I have been making sound effects and music for 10+ years. Each audio file I produce is given away in the public domain. For most of that time, I relied on Windows 10 and Audition.

About a year ago I switched over to Linux Mint as my primary operating system. And have consequently been using Audacity.

With all of that said, the point I would like to make with this thread is:

While there was a much steeper learning curve for getting started, I now produce media of significantly greater quality using FOSS tools, than I did with Adobe.

I have no issue with Adobe. They serve a need.

But for a number of reasons, Audacity is what took me to the next level, in terms of skills and output. It is ultimately free and open source software where I found my groove.

I hope this is the correct place to post. I explored LinuxMusicians and this forum seems to be the best spot for these thoughts.

I have the same with photography and graphic tools.
20 years ago I worked with an early version of Adobe Photoshop (a free copy from a friend )
But since I've discovered Gimp.... certainly since I've switched to Linux around 2014 I learned other programs like Inkscape, Rawtherapee.... all with limitations compared to Adobe's expensive software,... but I manage to do great stuff with FOSS.

[juzzlin]

I master all my songs in Audacity with the stock plugins + LSP

It is so super easy to build real-time effect stacks, love it! Can't wait for the 4-series.

[bretbernhoft]

Thank you to everyone who has commented on this thread. It is wonderful to read all of the similar experiences.

And like many of you, I too am looking forward to the next/4th version of Audacity. It looks like a game changer.