[Audacity-devel] Re: Comparison chart?

[Anthony A. O. <Ant...@ep...>]

On Wed, 14 May 2003 01:05:13 -0700, Dominic Mazzoni wrote:

>I don't think the goal will ever be to match high-end recording
>software feature-for-feature.  They have much more resources for
>development than we do.

>One of Audacity's strengths is that it is truly cross-platform.
>No other audio tool works on as many platforms as Audacity.

>Aside from that, I think that Audacity's strongest niche is that
>it provides access to some of the features of higher-end
>audio editors, but it's simple enough that most people can figure
>out how to use it.

These are strengths not to be underestimated. There are no other programs that
do this. Less than well funded people and institutions benefit from this
software being free and portable. People can carry their projects around to most
systems without a hitch(almost :). This is amazing, considering that
professional software doesn't handle this gracefully most of the time. Their
working solutions cost a LOT of money and are only now starting to get user
friendly.


>ProTools is NOT simple or obvious.  Neither are Cubase,
>Deck, Logic Audio, Ardour, or just about any of the other
>high-end programs.  They're all easier to use if you're familiar
>with typical recording equipment and mixing boards, but that's
>a huge learning curve for most users.

The professional has very high expectations on speed,efficiency and reliability.
Cubase is not high end, Logic Audio almost is, Protools is and Deck I don't know
much about.

Being familiar with analog equipment doesn't give you that big an advantage,
except avoiding some mistakes beginners usualy make, such as pre-EQ'ing and
compression before AD conversion.

Protools used to be complete crap to me interface-wise. Coming from
trackers(Protracker,Fasttracker,Impulsetracker,etc.) I was used to highspeed
keyboard interfaces and Protools(v3) was missing a load of good stuff like
keyboard shortcuts to zooming in and out and editing tool selection.

Now, as we hit v6, Protools would probably enable me to do work 10-20x faster
than Audacity. Most of this speed stems from the usage of regions and one-key
shortcuts.


>Audacity also has a number of unique features that most other
>audio editors do not have.  Off the top of my head:

>- The tempo track
>- Built-in envelope editing
>- Import Raw (that automatically guesses the format of the file)

This is a truely unique feature of a multitrack editor. Nice one there.


>- Better GUIs for Change Pitch and Change Tempo than any other
>   program I've seen

Watch that get a bit more complicated as we introduce regions. Only a bit
though.


>- Automatic resampling (I've never seen another program that lets
>   you put two tracks at different sample rates into the same window
>   without doing anything special)

Actualy there is one. It's Vegas from Sonic Foundry. Funny enough, Protools
can't do this at all, but has to convert those files to the session sample
frequency and bit depth. This is a true strength of Audacity(& Vegas).


>- Pitch display mode

Very interesting for analysis. Some day you may be able to make this editable
too. It'll require some complex algorythems, but there's one program that does
this well. Melodyne is a commercial app though. You may want to take a look at
it for ideas in this direction if you ever want to introduce such capability. (
http://www.celemony.com )

>Lots of people have told us that they own a high-end program like
>ProTools, etc. but they use Audacity also because of one of these
>features.  Since we're free, we don't need to replace these
>programs, just complement them.

I'd use it as well, but for two shortcomings right now. No VST GUI drawing and
no live preview of effect output. This is rather bad for any mixing or sound
design folks. The progress bar isn't that great either, but that's cosmetic.

 Tony