Audacity 3.0 Digital Audio Editor Released With New File Format

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Audacity 3.0 Digital Audio Editor Released With New File Format

Audacity 3.0 is out today as a big update to this popular, longtime open-source digital audio editor...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...y-3.0-Released

[ssokolow]

*chuckle* Exactly the reason I remember telling someone you might choose SQLite... situations where you want a big, complex pile of stuff in a single file for end-user experience, but you also need more efficient in-place modification than using a Zip file with a custom extension will get you.

[Dr. Righteous]

Gosh, Audacity is still my go to app for audio editing. Years ago I hosted a radio show for my church. I had to be producer, editor, and host. I did it all with Audacity, and USB connect mixer and a mic.

[waxhead]

Quite happy with the 2.x release, but looking forward to 3.0. As far as I can tell they did not screw up the GUI unlike other projects so a big thumbs up for that. There is a couple of things that I think could be improved and a few things that is a bit backwards , but overall an excellent program that does what it is supposed to do!

I think that Audacity could have improved if the overall program was altered so that you could mark multiple sections on a sample and apply different filters on those sections realtime more or less like openshot the video editor applies effects. Something like that could have been useful, but for me Audiacity is a good replacement for CoolEdit (or rather Audobe Audition).

[BwackNinja]

Not mentioned directly, but saving everything all in one file means that audacity should work better with flatpaks and xdg-desktop-portal.

[HD7950]

Still using that ugly interface?

[ssokolow]

Not mentioned directly, but saving everything all in one file means that audacity should work better with flatpaks and xdg-desktop-portal.

"Better" is the key. The xdg-desktop-portal spec does do directory pickers, but it's a younger feature so it's not as widely supported by the versions of the portal hosts shipped by distros.

[stormcrow]

Still using that ugly interface?

There's always someone... No matter the project UI or CLI. UI: Still using that ugly interface/Why is it a GUI? REAL users only use the console! CLI: Why isn't it a GUI, this is <insert year> after all.

[ssokolow]

There's always someone... No matter the project UI or CLI. UI: Still using that ugly interface/Why is it a GUI? REAL users only use the console! CLI: Why isn't it a GUI, this is <insert year> after all.

To be fair, it does use a lot of custom widgetry with theming that lags behind native widgets... especially the big round transport controls that are still present in various LTS distro releases.

[reavertm]

With the single project file approach, there may be some minor performance benefits too.

Yeah, "citation needed"..
I expect exact opposite. All individual tracks in raw format and metadata may be several megabytes. My simple 5 minutes song consisting of all mono tracks: metronome track, vocal track and various guitar tracks with no postprocessing plugins takes over 300 MiBs. I cannot imagine how single file project can bring any performance improvement, especially on system with no mmap (besides usage of Sqlite would prevent that anyway). Convenience when moving projects between computers, maybe, but that's about it. Directory lookup cost would be higher than Sqlite query only if track count would reach some absurd inode limits.