mhwaveedit VS audacity

Re: domains -- good point.

I found some screenshots of Dillo 0.6 -- interesting to see how little the GUI has changed over time, since 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020611213502/http://dillo.cips...

I'm not a software engineer, just an unix-minded end-user, but I've always seen this sort of consistency as very good, thoughtful engineering. Having an almost unchanged GUI for 20+ years is an indicator of well thought out defaults early on, I suppose.

Similar projects that come to mind are mhwaveedit and mtPaint (the latter was inspired by the former, /1, 2). I need to do audio work, so mhwaveedit is a gem that, for me, has replaced Audacity almost entirely. Blazing fast, with a consistent, extremely well thought out GUI again.

Eric S. Raymond used Audacity as an example of great unix-y GUI design in "The Art of Unix Programming". I've often thought, that, by now, Audacity somewhat suffers from "feature creep", including GUI-wise. mhwaveedit has managed to escape adding features.

Quoting a passage grom TAOUP: "Several features of this UI are subtly excellent and worthy of emulation /.../. But these are details. The central virtue of this program is that it has a superbly transparent and natural user interface, one that erects as few barriers between the user and the sound file as possible." /3

I'd say Dillo managed to maintain the same core idea in terms of web browsing, have as few barriers between the user and the HTML file as possible. No added bloat, for 22 consecutive years. This is quite remarkable, actually -- as compared to GUI (and other) changes of many other browsers. Obviously, the scope of those "other browser projects" is different as well; it's a different world.

Also, possibly the consistency of the GUI has to do with the use of FLTK, which kind of forces the devs to focus on the bare essentials.

Let's hope that these indications of Dillo's death (because no homepage) are greatly exaggerated. Greetings and a thousand thanks thus far to all of Dillo's devs!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint

2. https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit

3. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch06s01.html#au...

I've always found the Audacity UX to be cumbersome. I hope they make some big changes. I'm not super optimistic, though.

If your needs are simple, I find mhwaveedit[0] much more pleasant to use than Audacity. It also ships with a ton of high quality filters. Really nice piece of software.

0: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit

#5467 Fix 24-bit recording.

The time stretch algorithm is implemented in https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/master/libraries/l... particularly functions _time_stretch and _process_hop. It looks to me like a classic phase vocoder with vertical phase coherence (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_vocoder).

The basic idea is this. For a time-stretch factor of, say, 2x, the frequency spectrum of the stretched output at 2 sec should be the same as the frequency spectrum of the unstretched input at 1 sec. The naive algorithm therefore takes a short section of signal at 1s, translates it to 2s and adds it to the result. Unfortunately, this method generates all sorts of unwanted artifacts.

Imagine a pure sine wave. Now take 2 short sections of the wave from 2 random times, overlap them, and add them together. What happens? Well, it depends on the phase of each section. If the sections are out of phase, they cancel on the overlap; if in phase, they constructively interfere.

The phase vocoder is all about overlapping and adding sections together so that the phases of all the different sine waves in the sections line up. Thus, in any phase vocoder algorithm, you will see code that searches for peaks in the spectrum (see _time_stretch code). Each peak is an assumed sine wave, and corresponding peaks in adjacent frames should have their phases match.

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases

If you are able to build from source, you could download the latest source code, or the latest release version source code, and manually apply the patch.

FWIW: We'll be ditching the atlases for 3.4 most likely, in favor of having themes work like they do in source anyway: With individual PNGs for the icons and a Colors.txt containing all the color definitions. With that, custom themes would be much easier to author and also would stop breaking every time we introduce a new icon.

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/4639 this bug mentions everything, I guess it's Audacity after all. To be fixed in 3.3.2

No there isn't. I searched in vain for a workaround, and then checked the Audacity issues and found this: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/3385