On 15/07/2025 10:25, Will Godfrey wrote: [...] I do have quite a lot of (LV2) plugins and being on Manjaro (Arch based) I noticed I am in a strange situation where I have indeed duplicates of plugins in both /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 - but this is another story which is weird because apart from maybe Yoshimi I either install plugins from repositories or AUR and if I download any binary ones put them in ~/.lv2 The issue with Audacity is that it takes ages to search for plugins (VSTs, LV2, whatnot), and even cancelling won't help. Disabling all plugins also doesn't seem to help. And I can't seem to find ways to disable non-audaicity plugins, so Audacity insists in scanning plugins at start-up no matter what. In Tenacity there is an option to disable non-native plugins but it seems to be ignored because it complains at least about LV2 duplicates, plus there doesn't seem a way to specify explicitly which directories to search plugins for. In comparison Ardour or Carla load blazingly fast even with the many plugins I have installed. Ardour finds newly installed plugins on startup really fast, and in both even doing a full re-scanning for specific plugin-types does take a while but is relatively fast. The paradox is that ideally I don't really need external plugins (LV2, VST) in this kind of editor as I find the 'native' ones suffice for this kind of audio editing. I even tried compiling tenacity without any plugin support but it was rocket science and while I managed it in the end (and it took really really long and lots of CPU power), resulting in decent start-up time it's not a very maintainable solution. On the other hand mhwaveedit, GTK2 more ore less abandoned software - alas, loads large stereo wave files quite fast, has all basic editing features and a practical recording interface which works well when recording via jack which it supports natively; it also sort of works with pipewire (albeit with some lag in play/stop). It actually even has LADSPA support which I seldom use as the interface is really hardly usable with more complex plugins. Actually, I admit to having started recently to use a couple of Ardour sessions set-up for 'audio editing' where I just dump files I want to edit, edit them and then quick export via the start/end markers. This is still not as fast as an editor and in the long-run the session gets quite messy (if not cleaned up), but it is also a creative work-around option and you get the mighty power of Ardour like busses, effects etc. :-) Maybe (ab)using Ardour like this could be streamlined (hacked) via scripting, ardour session manipulation (which is XML), but not sure it's worth the effort :-D Lorenzo PS: for both Tenacity (via bug report) and Audacity (via their 'forum') I did report these issues.

Am 15.07.25 um 22:51 schrieb Lorenzo Sutton: On Arch/Manjaro: $ ls -ld /usr/lib64 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 08.05.2025 02:57 /usr/lib64 -> lib/

On 5/29/25 13:47, Brandon Hale wrote: I use Audacity. I tried Tenacity, all it did was crash or otherwise not work. When Audacity dropped telemetry, I never bothered with Tenacity again. I've used Wavbreaker <https://wavbreaker.sourceforge.io/> to split album recordings into separate tracks. It suffers UI issues I've encountered with a number of other graphics and audio applications: icons and most everything else is almost unusable on my 4K/hidpi display, they're just too tiny. Come on, people, use SVG, not tiny little bitmaps! And make sure your applications windows are resizable. When I was mixing 12 track recordings of my church band, I used Audacity. I don't come from a background of using mixing boards and just wasn't able to get that mindset into my head. I appreciate the power that DAWs offer, just don't find them usable for me. Finally, I think I can still safely say that pro-audio users in the Linux world are a tiny fraction of the pro-audio world that includes Microsoft and Apple, and we're an even tinier fraction of Linux audio users. So maybe there's not a crowd of users clamoring for Linux pro-audio tools? As long as they can hear their media of choice, and participate in online video conferences, I don't think many Linux users think about audio. Question: How to visually-challenged Linux users do such editing? Ideas? -- David W. Jones gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com "My password is the last 8 digits of π."

I don't think the issue is Linux's interest among the general populous. There has been a considerable amount of progress made on the web front and now with Web Audio API and other modern browser technology many new kinds of products are coming out that sort of replace the need to learn how to edit audio. I'm talking about services like Descript and Riverside.fm, who have clever web-based tools that abstract away the editing process to make it much more approachable for the average user. Audio editing in particular requires some knowledge of audio, i.e., zero crossing, fading, clipping, etc., and Descript came up with a way to make it as simple as editing a word document. The other issue is that while audio quality could be considerably higher learning a tool like Wavelab or Audacity, the need simply is not there anymore. Podcasts that make millions a year do just fine publishing Zoom calls over non-mastered 92kbps stereo MP3 files. Why bother using tools like timeline-based audio editors in such a landscape? On 5/29/25 19:59, Brandon Hale wrote:

On Thursday, May 29, 2025 10:24:53 PM Central Daylight Time Paul Davis wrote: A little knowledge of audio is a dangerous thing? -- Chris

On 5/29/25 20:59, Brandon Hale wrote: I've noticed this also. While I appreciate seeing more linux use, I note that Resolve and Reaper aren't open source, which saddens me. I do like Resolve, despite not being open source. A bit off topic, but two nice features of Resolve that I'll point out that is that is has a great audio editing system, inherited from Fairlight consoles.  This would likely lessen the appeal of using a separate audio editor. The second great feature is that is has good workgroup tools, either based on Postgres locally (or with VPN), or via their new cloud service. For multi-editor projects, this is great, and this is a feature that could easily be worth seeing in other tools like Ardour, Shotcut, or Kdenlive.