Re: [Audacity-devel] (no subject)
A free multi-track audio editor and recorder
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From: Markus M. <me...@me...> - 2004-03-19 14:23:21
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Alexandre, now I finally had time to read your post and think about it. Am Fre, den 19.03.2004 schrieb Alexandre Prokoudine um 10:01: > Point one: Commercial distribution. > > I really like Dave's and Dominic's ideas. But I would > like to state that inexpensicecds is still on eBay > making money. There are two ways you can "beat" them > (if ever want to): by price and by > functionality/additional stuff. Don't forget people mostly don't seem to know that the program itself is free when they buy this stuff on eBay. Honestly, I don't think that Audacity is a good candidate to make money. It is a program with a comparably small function set (and small download size!). It is very self explaining. If something doesn't work, people get answers on audacity-help in matter of hours to minutes. Look, e.g. I have bought the Premium edition of Ximian Desktop for $99. It's not so much that they have extra apps or so, but there's a support line I can ask if something doesn't work ("something" being one of their distributed packages, which is pretty much every application on my system). Not that the Gnome people would be unresponsive, but try to find something who wants to help if the sound mixer doesn't connect to esd, because OSS won't work with ALSA. I don't think this model will yet work for Audacity. That said, I could imagine that people still buy a CD to help the project (intentionally). But these can as well donate per PayPal now. > Poin two: Future. I think you're on the wrong track here. See, when you take a WAVE editor, and add multitrack functionality, you get a multitrack editor. When you add MIDI functionality, you get a sequencer. When you add support for plugins and professional sound/expansion cards, you get a DAW. Etc. etc. I don't know what Dominic's etc. ideas are with Audacity, but Audacity currently defines itself as being an easy-to-(instant-)use audio editor with multitrack capabilities and plugin support. Of course, with time Audacity will get more features, eventually being able to replace ProTools or other programs (technically). But it has been said before that if people want a DAW they should use Ardour, and when they want a Sequencer, they should go for Rosengarden. This even may eventually prevent useful features from being included, because they may deviate from the original direction Audacity is ment to go. And that's a good thing. Side note: That's one result of Audacity being free software: Of course we hope that many people will find Audacity useful, but we won't gain anything (at least financially) by saying "let's expand into the sequencer market now". We can just concentrate on what's our strength, and even on things we have fun implementing. Talking about "Alacrity", I'd say, let's just wait and see. At the moment, the only thing that exists is a design document. > Audacity already has a mechanism to handle features > requests. Could a a features roadmap be the next step? A feature roadmap would in principle be a good idea, but keep in mind that people are working on implementing these features in the spare time. I don't really know how much time I'll have for Audacity in, say, next summer or something. Maybe I'll be bored (actually, I don't think that will happen ever ;-) and spend hacking four continous weeks on Audacity, maybe I'll not even have time to answer audacity-help. So a feature roadmap would be useless here. Markus |