Notices by LWinterberg (lwinterberg@c.im)

@Brendanjones
Tantacrul posts screenshots of upcoming versions, I tend to run polls with an associated discussion in discord. It's not the highest quality of research results we get out of this, but given we don't have any telemetry, it allows us to draw at least a vague picture of things. It really is as much a community building and marketing tool as it is a research tool, which is kind of interesting.
@scottjenson

@killyourfm The thing uses whisper.cpp which you also can test in some other apps. https://whisper.ggerganov.com/ is a browser-based version of it.

@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.

@forteller There also is a feature you can enable in the preferences called "enable cut lines", which does pretty much what you'd want it to do. https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/preferences_settings_that_affect_edit_behavior.html#cut_lines

It's a sort of legacy feature though.

@forteller Ctrl+L mutes the area, Ctrl+I puts a split in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpA138b-J9s shows how it works

@forteller If you use the latest version, you can make cuts in the audio via ctrl+I and trim/untrim the edges near the top of each clip.