The Light of Day

Letter to the Audacity team

I’m gradually migrating from Windows to a Mac, and I’d love to see Audacity become a total replacement for the kind of work I’ve spent hours on in Cool Edit over the past several years.

Some features that would be extremely useful for me:

Cue points (snapping to cues would be helpful, as would some kind of snap to nearest zero-crossing). Cool Edit has distinct cues for the session and for the waveforms themselves, which are saved as part of the wav files. I don’t know about everybody else, but I’ve found cue points to be incredibly useful in lots of ways.

Speaking of zero-crossings, if this is meant to be a dirt-simple application for the average person to use, why not make it by default always adjust every selection to the nearest one? It would take negligible processor time to seek out towards the left and right at the same time and use the first one it finds in either direction (and there’s always one nearby). There’s really not much benefit to cutting anywhere else, and any time you do, you have to put a fade on it to avoid a click.

Linear enveloping. Log fades are great at the end of a song, but not ideal for crossfades or very short fades, which there are going to be a lot more of in a complex edit. It’s easier to bend a straight line than to straighten a curved line.

Locking in absolute time, and grouping in relative time (less important to me than the above two).

I’ve also thought that it could be useful to somehow convert Cool Edit session files into Audacity projects, but even if the above suggestions were implemented there would be some incompatibility. For example I tend to let wave blocks partially overlap one another on the same track, which is apparently prevented in Audacity, probably for a good reason. Also I don’t know anyone who personally wishes to reverse-engineer the binary session files. :)

I’m also confused that when I slide a section of a wave around, I can’t seem to drag it to exactly the beginning of the project, it just freely slides past it. Not sure what the benefit of that is; if I wanted to lose the beginning off of something, I’d cut it off. Dragging it to where it overlaps another section would actually be more useful. I could see that causing confusion for inexperienced users though.

Tracktion has a nice way of being able to adjust the left and right edges of a section of a wave without actually moving the material within; it would be neat if that was possible too, for example if you cut something off too short and needed to extend it.

Okay, I’ve said a whole bunch of stuff here, and I know Audacity is its own program and not meant to be a replacement for anything, so I’ll stop acting like a guy on a date who can’t stop talking about his ex-girlfriend. But if nothing else, cue-points and linear envelopes would be really nice. Thanks for letting me submit my thoughts and feedback!

-Keith

Money, it’s a… medium of exchange for goods and services

How, ideally, should I be making money? With some of the tools I’m coding, and some of the insight that I’ve gained recording and producing music, I certainly have a lot of value to potentially provide to other musicians. I’ve done paid recording sessions for my friends. Independent music sites, such as CD Baby, encourage us to support our fellow artists by purchasing from the same sites that we sell on. The meta-problem is this:

Artists can’t just make money off of other artists.

That would be like a dead-end pyramid scheme — the money has to eventually come from somewhere else, or eventually it would crap out and leave someone with the short end of the already-too-short stick. To survive in the macroeconomy, we have to somehow make money from the non-artists that provide us with boring things like food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and medicine. Right now all those people are buying their media from large companies. We need to appeal to them, not to “support” us, but to see that they need us; we need to be valuable to them.

In other words, if I make a living by providing production and mastering tools for non-corporatized musicians, it’s a finite quantity of money. Sure, it may be enough to even get me through the rest of my life, but it’s still a well being depleted if it somehow doesn’t connect to the rest of civilization somewhere along the line, and ultimately the whole point of this “life” thing isn’t to grab stuff and fuck people over.

Imagine a single poverty-stricken family in an otherwise well-off small-town neighborhood. Imagine this family is resourceful enough that each member sells some goods and services to keep afloat, but they avoid interacting with the rest of the townspeople because there are just too many bad vibes out there. Father sells his goods to daughter, daughter to mother, and mother to son. They “keep it in the family”. It’s clear to see that this family is on the fast lane to eviction. Now pretend they’re all musicians, Flash animators, open source programmers, and video bloggers, and multiply that by a few million.

Enter the the big corporations. You can try to market your talent to them, but then you have to cry every time you see it being used for evil purposes. The good part is that now the financial flow includes your plumber and your dentist, so you know you’re not dooming artistkind to an eternity of leaky pipes and rotting teeth. The bad part is that you’re helping to fill the world with … just go out there and listen, need I say more?

Since these monoliths have crippled their own creative potential (including the potential to embrace new creativity from outside their own tinted-glass doors) by their very nature, we can’t rely on them. But we can’t ignore them either. They know how to connect to Joe Normal, and we need to study how they do this. Keep in mind “Joe Normal” is not the same as “Joe Amoral” — thugs will always be thugs, and we don’t need to sell to them, nor would that be good for the macroeconomy — but we do need to figure out how to show our value to the people out there that provide us with roads, houses, schools, socks, refrigerators … you get the idea.

Help yourself to refreshments

While you’re waiting for new and exciting stuff, you can check out my page at ruccas.org, a wiki entirely devoted to generative artists. Be sure to check out the other pages too, of course — some people are doing some interesting stuff. (And, uh … some people aren’t.)

Before too long I should have Mana up. I was surprised by how many new overdubs it called for, considering that it was supposedly “done” and I was just touching it up. I’d like to do a walk-through piece where I give you a tour of the individual parts.

I’m also coding up some mastering tools; mainly spectral graphs, and modeling the overall sound quality from one recording to another. My first second attempt at getting The Nile Song to sound like Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With was … not *as unsuccessful* as it could have been. The fact is, though, crappy recordings have big gaping holes in their spectra, where you have to actually put something before you can bump it to the right level.