29 May
2025
29 May
'25
12:02 p.m.
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've been a fan of mhWaveEdit for its mix of simplicity and
configurability, but as an abandoned GTK2 application it shows its problems.
Is this kind of software not interesting any more? Are people using DAWs
for everything?
Are people even using, or interested / committed in using Linux Audio
any more?
As LAC approaches (unfortunately I won't be able to attend, even though
it's in Europe), why not try to spark some debate :-P
Lorenzo
[1] https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/549
29 May
29 May
12:35 p.m.
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
7:51 p.m.
Great to see several promising and useful projects mentioned
here!
On Thu, May 29, 2025, Erik Schoster wrote:
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.)
I've thought about this problem space, wanting a convenient
way to mark time ranges for GUI and terminal users of my
multitrack audio editor Nama.[1] Modifying MHwaveedit to
output these ranges was a possibility I considered. Adding
these features to Nama's bitrotted GUI is more within my
abilities, although most of people who want a GUI already
have many alternatives.
Due to my limited resources and the many GUI options
available, I'm focusing on implementing these capabilities
in the terminal.
Nama works in a modular way, generating the audio network
definitions that Ecasound uses to record, play and edit
sound. Not exactly a pipeline, tho. I will note it's much
easier to interface with other software resources than
develop them from scratch :-)
> Are people even using, or interested / committed
in using Linux Audio
> any more?
Hell yes! I don't think LAU list traffic is an especially
good indicator. People don't post about things that work as
intended, and much Linux audio software has their own
support fora.
Cheers to all Linux audio developers and users!!
1. https://gitlab.com/bolangi/nama/
--
Joel Roth
32
days inactive
33
days old
linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org
3 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
Erik Schoster -
Joel Roth -
John Rigg -
Lorenzo Sutton