[Audacity-devel] (no subject)

[Alexandre P. <tec...@la...>]

Hi everybody!

I'd like to share several thoughts with you. it might
be a good idea to split them into several letters, but
they are quite intertwined in each other.

While reading, you might think that I'm trolling or
err... ogring :) Feel free to kick Shrek out of me then :)

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.

You won't ever need my comments about price :) As for
additional stuff - this is what you use ta call "add
value". See, most of proprietary software comes with
examples. In most cases the very first time you start a
sound app, it asks you whether you would like to open a
sample project and mess around :)

To the best of my knowledge, Audacity is used by many
non-power users, who would really appreciate such thing.

I remember Dominic or Matt uploading two sample
projects or at least two pair of files to be mixed. If
you make a sample project of, say, 4 tracks (drums,
bassline, piano and some soloing instrument) and make
it easy to open it -- this will be great.

Poin two: Future.

I wonder, if you do, but I really have no idea what
Audacity will be like in a year. I spent much time on
using sound apps (for Win) about 5 years ago. At that
time both Cubase and Cakewalk still were
MIDI-sequencers and were not that good for audio.
Samplitude was just a multitrack recorder/editor.
CoolEdit was just an editor. Some time later I stopped
using them all for some reasons. I never returned to
them till last week.

This is why I felt fine about Rosegarden and MusE being
just sequencers with decent MIDI implementation and
poor audio, and Ardour being just a multitrack
recorder/editor. It was the way I used to think of
software for musicians. I was wrong.

Several days ago I installed modern versions of DAWs
for Win -- Samplitude, Nuendo etc. just for my
curiousity, what they look like now. You might know
what I've found out: they are all DAWs now, except
Adobe Audition (ex-Cooledit) and SoundForge. In all
other apps MIDI and audio are tightly integrated.

When I look at opensource apps, I see that there is no
real DAW like e.g. Nuendo, because developers focus on
either MIDI, or audio only. This is why I didn't like
much the fact that Alacrity will be a standalone app,
however much integrated with Audacity.

I'm not saying that we should copy nuendo/cubase/logic
byte-to-byte, function-to-function and pixel-to-pixel.
Please remember it as you come closer to me with those
baseball sticks in your hands :)

And this is where I'd like to give example of Inkscape
(www.inkscape.org). As an application it is out of
focus here, but as a project it is worth looking at.
They have ... (drumroll...) features roadmap :) And the
main thing is that that really follow it.

Audacity already has a mechanism to handle features
requests. Could a a features roadmap be the next step?

I also have some notes about current website of
Audacity, but I will share them a bit later, after I
sort them out better.

Alexandre