[linux-audio-user] Audacity/Windows/Plugins

[Mark Knecht]

Daniel James wrote:
> On Thursday 29 Apr 2004 10:50 pm, Mark Knecht wrote:
> 
>>Since writing the first message here I Spent some time looking at
>>the Audacity-help archives. I think I won't even bother loading
>>Audacity. It appear the community is not very helpful. It looks
>>like fewer than 20% of the requests there get even a single
>>response.
> 
> 
> I don't think that's the case at all - try the audacity-users and 
> audacity-devel lists and you'll see lots of requests for help being 
> answered.

Daniel,
    I do not subscribe to any Linux devel lists. They have, over and 
over again. proved to be not good places for me to spend my time. Life 
is too short.

    If I've stepped on your toes I apologize for that, but my I Stand by 
my comment. Looking at audacity-help (or the first 5-6 pages of the 
archives) the response rate is pretty miserable:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=828

If you are saying this is the wrong place for me (and others) to get 
help then possibly you should eliminate this list all together. However 
I'm sure you'd agree that a list called 'Audacity Help' isn't a bad 
place for a new user to ask.

I chose this list by going first to the Audactiy List page at Source 
Forge, at this address:

http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=6235

and then going down the list, starting from the top, and looking for a 
good place to get help. Since audacity-help shows up first, and since it 
has about 8 times as many posts (>16K vs about 2600 for audacity-user) I 
spent my time reading in that forum. If you think I've made some mistake 
then that's your right but I stand by what I said. There are lots of 
people posting in audacity-help and getting no response.

Actually, looking at audactiy-users archive, the first page, there are 
25 threads dating back to 3/22/04. Of those 25 threads 10 go unansered 
in any form. That's 40% of the users that got no response from anyone.

Possibly these archives are a bit bogus though as there doesn't even 
seem to be traffic since April 4th which is a month ago, making me think 
no one is using this program, but that's where you sent me.

> 
> Audacity is an excellent destructive editor, especially for very large 
> projects that can't be worked on with a RAM-based editor, such as 
> Sweep. It's also very easy to use for musicians who aren't computer 
> literate, because the GUI is very straightforward.

I'm sure it is.

> 
> It can also be used as a multitrack recorder, although overdubs need 
> manual timing adjustment because the latency using the OSS interface 
> isn't great. The main limitations on Linux are that native ALSA and 
> JACK support is still experimental, but apart from that it is 
> extremely stable and reliable. We can record eight tracks at 48KHz 
> sample rate for half an hour or more without glitches. (For some 
> reason, at 44.1KHz we can only do six inputs reliably).

I'm sure that it works as designed and that the source code is good quality.

> 
> Cheers
> 
> Daniel
> 
>