Audacity 3.5 Brings Cloud Project Saving, Improved BSD Support

[kpedersen]

Look at the screenshot in the article. It looks very ugly.

It looks like a misconfiguration issue (build-time by the packager or run-time by Michael).

Audacity is based on wxWidgets and that toolkit basically wraps Gtk, Qt (or Motif, X11, Win32). Sure wxWidgets doesn't always wrap the other toolkits perfectly, but there is no reason for it to look *quite* that ratty

It looks like it is using wxGTK2 rather than wxGTK3, and *also* without any Gtk 2.0 themes so you see that slightly drab Windows 95-style default Raleigh theme.

[uid313]

It looks like a misconfiguration issue (build-time by the packager or run-time by Michael).

Audacity is based on wxWidgets and that toolkit basically wraps Gtk, Qt (or Motif, X11, Win32). Sure wxWidgets doesn't always wrap the other toolkits perfectly, but there is no reason for it to look *quite* that ratty

It looks like it is using wxGTK2 rather than wxGTK3, and *also* without any Gtk 2.0 themes so you see that slightly drab Windows 95-style default Raleigh theme.

But it wraps like GTK 2 or 3 nor GTK 4, and it wraps like Qt 4 or 5 not Qt 6.

[waxhead]

Look at the screenshot in the article. It looks very ugly.

What you think is ugly I find structured and clean. Functions are grouped with borders, buttons are clear and visible and you know what you can click on and what you can not. Dropdowns and checkboxes and sliders all show their function. Quite unlike typical cellphone GUI's where it is very unclear what has a function and what does not. Besides, themes can take away borders and stuff like that if you really prefer a program to look like a clothing magazine (which is mostly for and designed by women - just look and you will see that it seldom has borders and groups).

If anything the GUI should be more compact for my taste and the big play, stop, record, etc... buttons should have been 50% size at least. That is a personal preference, and the titlebars are about 300% oversized. That again is something that is not wxWidgets fault, but the window manager decorations that is chosen.

[Vistaus]

But it wraps like GTK 2 or 3 nor GTK 4, and it wraps like Qt 4 or 5 not Qt 6.

wxWidgets doesn't even wrap like Qt all that well. Even on Qt-based desktops with the wrapper, it still looks like, feels like and behaves like a GTK 2/3 app.

Not that much experience with Audacity, though, but I do use Poedit a lot (unfortunately - I'd much rather use Lokalize if it wasn't so buggy), which also uses wxWidgets.

[elatllat]

Yet still requires X11 from 1984 in order to record without eating all your RAM and crashing lol.

[Vistaus]

What you think is ugly I find structured and clean. Functions are grouped with borders, buttons are clear and visible and you know what you can click on and what you can not. Dropdowns and checkboxes and sliders all show their function. Quite unlike typical cellphone GUI's where it is very unclear what has a function and what does not. Besides, themes can take away borders and stuff like that if you really prefer a program to look like a clothing magazine (which is mostly for and designed by women - just look and you will see that it seldom has borders and groups).

If anything the GUI should be more compact for my taste and the big play, stop, record, etc... buttons should have been 50% size at least. That is a personal preference, and the titlebars are about 300% oversized. That again is something that is not wxWidgets fault, but the window manager decorations that is chosen.

I do agree with uid313 that it could be made to look prettier, but I also agree with you that I love seeing that they have made it clear what is what. It should look a bit better, but keep all of the good stuff you mentioned as well. It's not impossible with modern theming.

[DumbFsck]

I wonder how long they will stay with wxWidgets...

waxhead, rmfx, uid313, kpedersen

I'm not involved in the project in any way/capacity. But AFAIK they are re-vamping everything in the UI in a full re-write and using QML (I think it wasn't stated as much, but I'm judging from what positions they opened and hired for).

Their intention is to not only make it look better and improve UX, but also to make it easier to add/remove/improve features and maintainability in the future. It is I believe the third year (or fourth) of them re-building it, so I guess Audacity 4.0 might come this year?

Again, I'm pulling most of it out of my (very) imperfect memory of news on the topic and making educated assumptions straight out of my ass.

[DumbFsck]

What happened to the telemetry controversy?
Did they revert it in the end or did they keep it?

That was a very funny controversy.

They wanted to collect info on how people use the product - which I'd argue is necessary to build good products in basically every area ever. It was supposed to be opt-in, anonymised etc etc....

People misunderstood the PR and since Audacity had just been 'acquired' by a big group, everything was blown out of proportions... Add to that a bit of bad PR (public relations in this case) and there we have it... My crystal ball foresees that they'll remove some feature or change where it lives and people will come out of the woods to say this is the most important thing and that every Audacity user needs it yadda yadda, which they could have known had people been more understanding and welcoming of OPT-IN telemetry.

[sophisticles]

It looks like a misconfiguration issue (build-time by the packager or run-time by Michael).

Audacity is based on wxWidgets and that toolkit basically wraps Gtk, Qt (or Motif, X11, Win32). Sure wxWidgets doesn't always wrap the other toolkits perfectly, but there is no reason for it to look *quite* that ratty

It looks like it is using wxGTK2 rather than wxGTK3, and *also* without any Gtk 2.0 themes so you see that slightly drab Windows 95-style default Raleigh theme.

This is the way it looks on my computer using the appimage as well.

Worse yet, the appimage installed some libraries and now even the installed version from the Manjaro repos looks like shit.

I will have to uninstall Audacity and reinstall it to hopefully get it looking good again.

One of the biggest problems with open source apps, these amateurs do not know how to make a good looking GUI.

[Sonadow]

Audacity and its forks are one of two major software (second being OBS) that I have never been able to successfully compile on Linux for years. The last time I successfully built Audacity on Linux was v3.0

To the point where I now permanently maintain a Windows system just to build and run Audacity and OBS from source.