Børge
After editing a few podcast-ish thingies in #Audacity, here are some thoughts on features I need that I can not find or have found but should be front and center, not hidden away:
KS = keyboard shortcut
- Speed settings should always be disconnected from pitch, why would I want anything else?
- A way to switch speed on the normal playback (spacebar), with KS
- KS not only for incremental faster and slower, but also to set the speed to specific numbers manually set by me and back to 1x
Børge
- KS to skip to the end of the currently playing level of sound/noise
- Easy way to hide/fold back (think of the timeline as a piece of paper) a part of the timeline instead of deleting, and drag the folded piece in or out to hide more or less on each fold
- Option to automatically find and hide the pieces of the timeline that are probably silence/white noise, to make editing out all of them less of a chore
- A KS to fade out, in or first out then in again the marked part of the timeline
Børge
(per the previous point: Having to first click Envelope tool/F2 then make three markings on the timeline and drag them up and down, and if you drag it too high up it automatically goes all the way down so you have to fix that, and even when you just click the first time it goes a tiny bit down so you have to fix that too, and then click back to Selection tool/F1 is just sooo friggin annoying!)
Børge
- I always want to normalize every project I work on once. It should be easily available!
- Also Noise reduction could be one of those things I have to use many times, why do I have to hunt for it in a menu?
That's my thoughts so far, I think. Other than that I just some times cut a segment to move it to another place or speed up a section a bit, and all the other tons of features I don't really care about.
Børge
Maybe there should be like a spoken word fork of Audacity?
But I want to emphasize that I do truly appreciate all the hard work put in for free in creating Audacity, and am thankful that I have this tool! Especially since I can't code myself. I understand that this is not easy to make, and I'm not demanding anything here. Just some thoughts on how it could be even better for my use case. :)
Børge
Oh, yeah, also speed of scrolling the timeline with the mouse wheel should be configurable. Or set a bit higher than it is now.
Børge
@LWinterberg Hey! Truly appreciate you reading my thoughts and giving me such a detailed reply! Love to see that you're working on so much of this already! That makes me feel even more confident in the product. Thanks again for your hard work! Much love and respect from Norway :D
LWinterberg
@forteller Thank you very much for this thorough feedback!
I've got some comments for some of your points:
* Speeding up while preserving speed is coming in 3.4, which you already can try out on audacityteam.org/nightly. It currently operates only on individual clips (alt-drag the clip edge), but should come to the play-at-speed function sometime in the future as well.
* Ripple editing ("folding paper" editing) is on the shortlist of features to add. I can't promise a date, but it's definitely known. In the meantime, you can enable "cutlines" or "editing a clip can move other clips" in the preferences -> track behaviors, they achieve results close to it.
* Tools are getting killed sometime soon. The multi-tool already exists (F6) which can edit envelopes and make selection at the same time, but it feels a bit weird too. Once we fix the UX for it and for envelope editing, there won't be a reason for dedicated tools anymore.
* Favorites function for effects (Normalize, noise reduction) has a design and some of the functionality in the backend and also should come somewhat soon. (you already can edit the EffectMenuDefaults.xml file in the installed folder to edit the categories, though that's not an official feature)
* Timeline navigation/Zooming also has a design already.
Overall, I don't think there's a big need for a fork; we're aware of these (and *many* other) shortcomings and working to fix them.
I say "soon" for many for these features, but unfortunately it's not "holding your breath" levels of soon. Our main priorities currently are refactoring (making 20 years of spaghetti code less spaghetti-like), replatforming (from wxWidgets to Qt/QML, which lets us make UI changes much more easily) and adding new features to enable workflows (which for 3.4 is mainly beats & measures, to enable musicians to actually know where they are in their song). So in some sense, releases since 3.1 have been us being only 33% effective in delivering new features.
For the Qt version of Audacity, we'll definitely have separate "Workspaces" depending on what you're trying to do, which show you the features relevant for your task. And which you'll be able to customize.
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