Re: [Audacity-devel] Audacity use by radio stations

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> - Always snap to zero crossings

Heh.. Useful, but an odd request sort of... even if you cut at a zero
crossing, you still get spread-spectrum noise.

(in all my years of editing, I've never found 'just stick to zero
crossings' anywhere near sufficient.  This doesn't mean it shouldn't
be there.  Sometime's there's no choice, but even that usually implies
lack of understanding or a mistake on someone's part earlier in the
engineering chain)

> - The envelopes must be changed. It would be good to show linear
> envelopes (not logarithmic), as that is more clear visually. The
> processing could be done in logarithmic, however. It should also be
> possible to transparently _increase_ volume with the envelopes.

I can already view envelopes as either...  In the 'waveform' view,
envelopes are displayed on a linear scale.  In the 'waveform dB view',
envelopes are displayed log.  The fade processing is always log
regardless the view.  I think you meant to say something a little
different, and I actually probably agree with what you meant to say.

I can see the use of a decay being either log or linear.  Although
transitions nearly always sound best as log fades, you often want the
envelope sum across a fade to sum to unity.  Doing that right now
(roughly) is possible, but it could be easier.

> - Each audio clip could have a simple control at the start and the end
> to allow for simple parametrized fade in / fade out (without envelopes).
> There could be a user-defined minimum value for this fade-in (to make
> the experience softer, the user would, use always at least, say, 10 ms
> fade-in).

A feature I'd never use that would always take space on the toplevel
view.... it seems more like a simple effect than an 'always present
control of limited usefulness'.

In addition to a 'fade in' and 'fade out' effect, if it goes that
route, a sin^2 window crossfade would be nice.  I always find the need
to tweak by hand (no auto crossfade is ever perfect, and as a sound
engineer I'm a perfectionist), but it would give a much faster rough
cut for finding those situations of "Oh, I can't fade from mic 1 take
1 to take 3 here because the drummer can't decide if he likes his ride
or his splash more".

Popping to a higher level...

Unless I've read incorrectly, all capabilities on your requested
feature list are present now... but most certainly can't be done in
one click or under ten seconds.  Twenty seconds, yes.  Some better,
some worse.

As a side discussion, it seems some of the first thing people ask upon
discovering Audacity is 10-20 of their favorite features from another
app to get implemented.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing; many of
these are genuinely missing features, or an ideea to make things
faster for most users.

However, much of it is also 'smoothing a specific workflow', ie,
"Audacity can do it... but I don't like how it does it, so let's
change it to my way".  If we politely blow off these new requests,
people go away disgruntled.  When we implement them all, longtime
users end up relearning the app with every release.  I've been annoyed
by this in the past (although most of that was 'envelopes, what I use
most, seem to get broken every release' and I'm bracing for that
yet again...)

I also admit to being protective of the way things are; I'm a long-time
user and I already know how to do each and every one of the things
listed on the bullet-list above, and I've even gotten good at them.

Things can be improved, no question.  I just caution (as I always do)
to distinguish between genuinely new features, and simply
re-implementing knobs attached to features already there.  Better
knobs are welcome... but endless multiplication of knobs is not, nor
is replacing existing knobs with different but entirely equivalent
knobs.

I guess what I'm saying is:

1) If you're adding a knob, make sure it's either something entirely
new, or both replaces a knob and is genuinely better than the knob it
replaces.

2) Consider all use cases, not just the one use case you're trying to
resolve right now (several envelope features in the past year have
added something new and cool, but temporarily rendered the overall use of
envelopes maddeningly frustrating in the general case)

3) If more than half of users are going to click it at least once a
minute every minute they use Audacity, it belongs on the front
panel. Right now, our front panel reflects this very well.  If the
average user will use the feature once a day, it belongs in a
menu. Again, we're doing a decent job here.  

Things in between engender debate... (Data point: Adding a control to
be able to fade beginning and end of all tracks on the front panel is
useless enough to me that I'd go through the trouble of removing it in
the local copies my engineers and I use.  It doesn't even appear in
our work flow, and will only take up space/ hang around waiting to be
clicked by accident.  I already do this with other features that
people have triggered continuously and accidentally in the past, like
the 5% of the time you accidently resize the vertical view of a track
instead of grabbing an envelope control point.)

I see this adding fuel to the scripting debate... Mmm, the dream of a
skinnable, script-driven UI with several customizable default workflow
'skins' shipped to work out of the box....  A dream that drives strong
engineers mad :-) It easier to find examples of how *not* to do that,
than how to do it well...

Monty