It’s Free, It’s Open, It Almost Works
Friday, April 30th, 2004 at 8:17 am
Transom.org has posted a tutorial on Audacity that actually makes it seem usable.
I’m not a huge fan of the open source mixing program. I mean I would like them to succeed, I just don’t feel like being their beta testers and they seem to be in an eternal state of needing that. When I’m knee deep in a project I don’t like it much when the computer crashes and I lose work — no matter how good the cause.
Sure Audicity is free, platform agnostic, a community project, etc. etc. But if I were honest with myself I like paying for music software. I like the contract that says: my job is to pay you, your job is to make software that works.
The real price of Audicity is the guilt.
I don’t want to just download Audicity and use it. People worked really hard to make that thing work as well as it does and if I find a bug I want to help them isolate it, reproduce it and (since the source is available) debug it. And I’m just not in the mood to do that when I’m in the throws of a mix. Or trying to capture my emotions in sound. Or just screwing around. Or ever.
I looked at the source and it’s pretty clean. I’ve very seriously considered contributing source to the project and if I ever set aside a few months of my life to do that then I will feel better about using it and help make it better.
But as of this moment I have enough tools in my audio pallette. I don’t feel like making a debugger one of them.
April 30th, 2004 at 4:40 pm
If you haven’t used Audacity 1.2.0, you really should. It is an order of magnitude more stable than our previous versions. We really starting to get it right in the “just works” department. In a few days we’re planning to release version 1.2.1, which does nothing but fix all of the minor bugs we’ve encountered in 1.2.0.
This also depends a lot on your platform. We’ve had a lot of Linux contributers and testers, and we’re pretty solid there. Windows gets even more use, but we have fewer people contributing code, so it falls behind some of the time. The Mac OS X code is much newer and there’s only one person working on it, so it’s not nearly as mature.
Of course, if you have commercial tools that work well for you, we won’t complain if you use them instead. :)
April 30th, 2004 at 6:34 pm
Thanks Matt, definitely looking forward to the .1 release.
I use commercial tools that have a feature set (namely integrated soft-synth MIDI support) that I rely on for every project I do now and into the foreseeable future (if I were to contribute anything it would ReWire host support). For mastering I require DirectX plug-in support so again, Audacity falls out of my real-world usage.
However, since the #1 search term for this site continues to be “free” (with the term “crack” being a close 2nd) I always feel obligated to point out what’s out there for people with tighter budgets, er, different financial priorities and Audacity remains an important piece of that scenario.
Keep fighting the good fight!