On Thu, May 29, 2025, at 5:02 AM, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
Hi LAU and LAD,

It seems that (FLOSS) audio editors (not DAWs) are all either 
dead/obsolate (mhwaveditor, rezound), in strange development states 
(Audacity, Tenacity).
Tenacity, the most promising (albeit with its audacity-inherited 
idiosyncrasies) has a really annoying bug [1] which makes it take ages 
to load [1] - IMHO a no go for an audio editor IMHO (plus its 
multi-track-ness like Audacity makes it overload for a few use cases).

The only more-or-less usable one at the moment is ocenaudio which is not 
free software (and also has some UI quirks, but that's maybe personal).

I use this now too and I like it, but I'm also not really used to the UI yet. I couldn't put my finger exactly on why! I actually didn't notice it was closed source until your message, that's disappointing because I was happy to find a nice editor while audacity seems to be in a weird limbo -- and sometimes audacity is nearly unusable for me with incredibly long startup times.


I've been a fan of mhWaveEdit for its mix of simplicity and 
configurability, but as an abandoned GTK2 application it shows its problems.

I will try this out, thank you! I'm not a great C programmer and my availability is limited like everyone else but helping to revive a project like this would be fun, I think.


Is this kind of software not interesting any more? Are people using DAWs 
for everything?

I'm definitely interested! I do more audio work in scripts than DAWs but this sort of lightweight editor has been a useful part of my workflow since soundedit 16.

I'm curious also about what could be done, as a thought experiment, to break down an editor like this further into smaller components that might be possible to compose together like a unix pipeline somewhat?

For example I like YASS a lot because of its extreme simplicity and how it is basically a tool that sits well in a jack or pipewire environment along with other tools. (I do wish I could configure the number of channels on startup though!) 

A time-based view of a soundfile with probably at least some affordances to position a cursor and/or select a range of time would be nice (for me, personally, maybe not for others!) if it had some easy to interface API to pipe the selection data somewhere else. (To be a frontend for SoX maybe, or an interface to a custom script.)


Are people even using, or interested / committed in using Linux Audio 
any more?

I am! This is my personal project: https://git.sr.ht/~hecanjog/pippi with which I'd like to explore some of the modular GUI ideas discussed above some day... it's where I spend most of my audio time, but I'm a long time Ardour and Audacity user as well.

CLAP seems exciting, too, in terms of new or active developments in the linux audio world --- I'm also still really excited about pipewire, there are times when I have reverted to a plain jack backend, but it's been amazing to be able to patch together any linux application as though it were using the jack APIs.

Erik