I’m now in charge of Audacity. Seriously.

i have this little google docs folder filled with ideas for future videos some of which eventually go on to see the light of day some of which don't but somewhere else outside of reality in a bizarro world there's another folder containing videos i will definitely never make the harmonic genius of iron audi reppin with ben shapiro top 10 worst christmas songs of all time oh wait i actually might have made that one but anyway floating around in here somewhere is a video about me being a team member of audacity ah here it is except it's true you're watching it yeah audacity that app everyone uses that launches really quickly lets you record stuff and features six magnifying glasses seven if you count this one here what does this one do anyway select the audio for zoom to selection to use okay so why am i involved well in short audacity has just joined with muse group a collection of music apps that includes a popular open source notation program called musescore which i'm currently in charge of and since things are going rather well at musescore i was asked to step up and also manage audacity in partnership with its open source community and just like we're doing at musescore we're now planning on significantly improving the feature set and ease of use of audacity providing dedicated designers and developers to give it the attention it deserves while keeping it free and open source and since the first step in any new project is to understand it as deeply as possible i spoke to a few key members of the audacity team to understand how and why they built it so in this video i'm going to talk about audacity the history of its success and where it's going in the future audacity has been downloaded over 200 million times and is used by a diverse audience of musicians podcasters researchers live streamers and teachers as well as more casual audiences who just need a simple audio editing tool it's licensed under the general public license version 2 or gpl2 for short which is popular in the open source world because it prevents companies from closing off access to the source code and ensures that it's always free to use it was started in 1999 by dominic mazzoni at carnegie mellon university in collaboration with his professor roger dannenberg who has had an extensive career in researching computer music i've provided a few links to roger's audio work in the description the research they were doing covered various different types of audio analysis including melody detection and another thing called query by humming query by humming which is a problem basically of of homotune or singatune uh that you can't quite remember the title of and then go search a database and try to retrieve it the query by humming problem involved a lot of analysis of voice recordings to identify information like pitch and duration we found that you know as we wrote these algorithms it would be really useful to be able to compare and study this this audio more visually and we weren't finding very good tools out there and at some point we just decided it would be worth the time to write our own little tool but before they could set about creating an app to visualize waveforms there was another challenge that needed to be addressed we had um linux computers that we were doing for development i had a mac laptop and roger's computer music lab had windows so right away i knew i needed to figure out some solution for building something cross-platform so right from the very beginning audacity was built to function on all the major operating systems except it wasn't called audacity back then at that point it was called cmu visual audio and there would be a few other suggested names too like cross audio because it's cross platform audio monkey because you can monkey with audio and gecko because before they finally landed on audacity the city where oda lives and if you're interested here are some of the original emails where these names were discussed [Music] roger's most important contribution to audacity was nyquist a programming language developed for sound synthesis which provided a way to build plugins that extended audacity's capability regarding the interface of audacity dominic's instinct was to try and make it as simple as possible then when i got to grad school roger had much fancier audio mixing software in his computer music lab i found it really overwhelming at first and what struck me initially is that there was all this power in this tool but it was built for someone who had a background in a recording studio it really wasn't designed for the average person who just wants to uh record their garage band or just edit together at a mix of a couple of songs or something like that and it wasn't long before dominic began thinking of audacity as something that could be useful to a wide range of users and as the project broadened in scope it came to consume more and more of his time i ended up having more fun building software than doing research spending way too much time turning audacity into a fully functional editor and ended up leaving grad school after a couple of years realizing that i enjoyed building software more than i did doing peer research after dominic left carnegie mellon he more or less took the work on an audacity with him and and did a tremendous amount of work and recruited some really great people then as the program grew and became more popular its logistical complexity increased and different requirements emerged that were taken on by newer contributors hello i'm paul igameli i started uh hanging around the audacity forum around 2013 and learned a bit about nyquist list programming and uh wrote a de-clicker that many uh voice-over artists like to use a guy named paul l don't know who paul l is but he's he's pretty good guy thank you paul l whoever you are and wherever you may be for these two plugins anyway i hung out on the development board afterward became a team member in 2015. other contributors like peter sampson and steve dalton joined and began helping with testing which is really crucial for making sure the app performs reliably with very few crashes peter and steve are also massively helpful when it comes to documentation and running the audacity forum i'm steve i run the uh the help forum with a lot of help from uh from other people you know who contribute to answering questions and helping you helping to get people going we pride ourselves on really being able to respond to people as quickly as possible and to help them as much as we can it's worth mentioning that audacity does a better job of support and documentation than most other software companies who often regard it as a far lower priority but it's crucial for the success of any complex app some people see that as kind of a thankless task like they want to get building or they want to get designing and they don't want to they want to deal with people and don't write any notes about stuff it seems like an incredible resource that you just sort of provided and i assume you provided it for free as well oh yeah yeah and i guess why did why did you do it what was the motivation at the time the project was um celesting donations and i was just about to retire and i thought i don't really want to actually send money i've got time on my hands and i'll actually offer time instead i think imagine always being spending the amount of time that i have i mean this has turned out to be my longest ever job in my career then there's the issue of building the infrastructure needed to handle millions of downloads as well as security for their website and wiki page when you're talking millions of users these issues become very important my name is arturo bulayman people call me buanzo i'm audacity's infrastructure guy system administrator security guy when dominic said that he was looking for a system administrator i said hey well i have lots of experience in that so he said well can you take care of translation commits integrating strings and things like that and that's another thing translations this is a service that community members provide for audacity for free and it's a real superpower hold actually hold on a second what is that karaoke view what did you know there was a karaoke feature in audacity temptation man the stuff you find when you poke around i guess that's another superpower i haven't mentioned random janky easter eggs now audacity's success isn't just down to the fact that it's free there are loads of free audio apps out there timing probably also played a part when audacity came out it made up for a real gap the windows 98 audio recorder was um not what you'd call fully featured and when mac moved from os9 to os 10 there was a period where audacity was the only audio editor supported on the platform but that was a while ago so why is it still so successful today i think about that a lot and it's a really good question because there's so many different dimensions and perspectives to to think about there's just you know technical excellence and and quality maybe audio editors are are difficult to commercialize i'm i'm not sure but but it may be that a lot of people are not using audio commercially but but doing side projects and things that they love and so maybe they don't want to invest a lot of money and that doesn't support a lot of commercial development it's community we have a wonderful community if you if you just take a one visit through the forum you're gonna notice that it's almost self-sustaining a lot of people with a lot of skills have all come together and somehow it worked it all worked really well but i'm not sure any of us really fully understands it what would be the most unusual use of audacity that you've seen there are some scientific uses of it there are those who study the vocalizations of animals like bats and dolphins i don't know if you've ever heard the the sounds of crickets slowed down several octaves you should look it up they sound like howling dogs or monkeys i remember a a user specifically asked for a feature that would reverse an audio track like play it backwards and they were looking for subliminal messages from ufos and i i just thought that was the just the best it's been used i understand also by seismologists studying uh the propagation of earthquake waves through the earth's crust it's been used by cardiologists to study ekg output the most unusual use of audacity i've seen though is something called data bending you trick audacity to take an image file misinterpret it as sound apply an effect to it like echo and then export the file again and view how it morphed the image so as for my own involvement taking on a program like audacity is a gargantuan challenge from working on two other creation apps with large audiences in the past i've learned that there are rarely any easy wins for example it commonly happens that one group of users will clamor for an overhaul to a feature only for another group to cry file that that same thing should never change researchers and audio analysts will have different needs to musicians and podcasters for example even the appearance of audacity isn't so straightforward to change despite most people seeming to agree that it could do with the lick of paint but the devil's in the detail let's take the logo for example as a designer my automatic instinct is to want to finesse and modernize it but should that be done we've had lots of people submitting uh suggestions for it when we've always somewhat resisted that logos are really hard to design because they carry a really deep message it's all through sort of connotation and graphics i think it it is important to keep the qualities of open source and community and homegrown as opposed to some real you know slick corporate look it's got excellent brand recognition i love it i just love it the thing is this logo is iconic incredibly well known it might feel unpolished and homespun but that quality itself also tells a story perhaps it can be finessed very subtly i i don't know actually i was wondering if maybe we could try something like changing a pixel of the audacity logo every five days [Laughter] [Music] i don't know what i say um do you want to try suggesting to bmw that they changed their logo from time to time people would suggest a new logo and we got contributions of new logos it was really hard to keep people civil because people reacted so strongly whenever anyone did that i think you know you can see one of the differences between an open source project and you know a corporate project is as being like uh you know something that's made by craftsmen they're lovingly made by hand yeah rather than something that's churned out by the machine have you seen the audacity pumpkin i have oh god it's terrifying i carved that pumpkin so regarding the future of audacity i'm only just getting started but now that the cat's out of the bag i'm going to be conducting interviews and setting up new spaces to engage with existing users to find out what kinds of things they'd like to see us build for example one thing we're currently working on is non-destructive stackable vst effects there's also lots to do on straightforward ux just making things easier to find and use we're also looking at some fairly out there experimental stuff too i've made a spectrogram in perspective view as a landscape a three-dimensional landscape it looked like something i could reach out and touch but like when i saw the 3d spectral editing prototype that you built the first thing that occurred to me was you could manipulate that with features that are a little bit like 3d sculpting tools like zed brush i don't know if you know that application but basically you use your mouse to move a pointer in 3d space and you can sculpt around a model my fantasy project for future audacity would be the haptic spectral editor i'm aware of gloves that have been developed for this so that you can reach out and feel sort of 3d models that are in space that it gives you the right sort of haptic feedback imagine not just having this modeling tool but being able to actually use one of these gloves to reach out and grab the spectrum and kind of push it down manually with your hand or something like that that's the triple synesthesia of sight and sound and touch another thing i should mention is that we're going to be publishing our designs so people can comment on them the ability to work out in the open like this is a really amazing quality that open source projects have which many other projects can't match keep an eye on our social media links which i've put in the description you can also check out my twitter where i'll occasionally be putting out calls for user testing and prototyping and it's also worth mentioning that alongside our open source community audacity is going to be hiring a few key positions for senior developers or designers who have experience in audio or music tech those links are also in the description and as for this channel it's business as usual i may very occasionally speak about audacity when i think there's something to say that will appeal to general audiences anyway i'm off now to do some design work i gotta roll up my sleeves and bring into existence the fabled eighth magnifying glass we've all been waiting for if you like my diatribe subscribe

Channel: Tantacrul

Views: 97,705

Rating: 4.9864712 out of 5

Keywords: Tantacrul, Audacity, Audaciy, audacity 2021, audacity newsletter, Audacity news, Tantacrul and Audacity, MuseScore, Audacity 3.0, audacity audio editing, audacity audio interface, audacity audio recording, free and open source software (foss), Audacity interview, audio editing, recording software, audacity (software), voice over

Id: RMWNvwLiXIQ

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sfwtn]

oh shit, are they finally gonna update the ui? it's not bad by any means, but it's really dated

[u/aoeudhtns]

The thing I like about Tantacrul isn't just that he's funny and snarky. It's that he doesn't rush in with an "I'm going to put my stamp on this" mentality. He is obviously sensitive to history and engagement and making the product better by working within the community. I think this is fantastic news for Audacity - I've always loved the software but it could really do with some attentive UI/UX work, especially from someone like Tantacrul, who won't copy bad UI/UX from similar products and deem it better just because it resembles other difficult-to-use software.

ETA - And Tantacrul will also understand professional workflow. My uncle kept a Windows XP box running Wavelab 6 for years because he had memorized all the keyboard shortcuts and program behavior. They changed everything up in later versions and he didn't want to slow down to learn new keyboard shortcut schemes.

[u/frnxt]

For some people you wonder whether they actually sleep ;)

Anyway, this is great news, the guy's been doing awesome work with Musescore's UI and UX!

EDIT: I absolutely didn't know Audacity had a karaoke feature!

[u/Yoshua-chan]

This guy is climbing up the ladder of FOSS audio software so fast he's gonna be in charge of pulseaudio at some point.

[u/AnythingAnthingAnthi]

     The maker of the video is clearly considerably and intelligently and passionately engaged. Good stuff. One of various things that struck me - though perhaps this is trivial - is how the nice the Mac (I'm confident it is the Mac) menus look. I wish Linux could look that good.

[u/f_r_d]

This is HUGE

[u/Nonononoki]

Hopefully GIMP is next :)

[u/BrEpBrEpBrEpBrEp]

open audacity

sibelius crashed

[u/Khyta]

I wonder how the redesign will look!