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Comment by rosmax_1337 | Hacker News Reader

I completely understand that people find the UI offputting. But the UI is effective. Or maybe I should say the UX is effective? Either way, an effective UI/UX is more than what a lot of "newer and fancier" UIs have going for them. And since the application is meant as a tool for creators, and not a product facing consumers (as a website might be), personally I can completely forgive a "clunky ui", as long as it is logically laid out and with normal workflows.

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Let me be clear, when I say clunky, I mean clunky, not old-fashioned or anything like that. I live in Vim and the terminal. I know perl. I can handle un-shiny UI.

To give a concrete example: suppose I want to apply noise cancellation (something very few free audio tools provide I must add, and a really cool feature of Audacity):

- You select your track

- You go in Effect, you skim through the long (alphabetized) list to find "Noise reduction"

- You realize that you forgot to generate your noise profile, so you close the pop up because you can't reselect when the pop up is active

- You select your noise reference

- You return to Effect, skim through the long (alphabetized) list again, find noise reduction again

- You tell it to use the selected audio as noise reference.

- You close the window

- You select the entire audio again

- You return to Effect, skim through the long (alphabetized) list again, find noise reduction again

- You can tweak the various reduction parameters, then you can click "preview" again which pops a 2nd window up with a rudimentary audio player that doesn't let you do anything besides listening to the selected audio from the start. You can't focus on a particular zone or anything. If you want to do that you have to apply the noise reduction, close the module, return to the main window, listen to your track on the proper timeline then undo the reduction and return to Effects, skim through the long (alphabetized) list etc...

If there's a better way to do any of this I haven't found it.

I don't want to really to be too hard on Audacity, I'm genuinely thankful for its existence, but it's not a good example of UI done right IMO.

I like minimalism in UI, but I think it works best when it's flexible and composable (like Vim commands for instance). Audacity UI's is neither, it's just a long series of ad-hoc modules.

I downloaded Audacity for a project to do exactly what you described and it was very clunky. The method I ended up using was cutting the start of the track so the first few seconds were what I wanted to preview, then went through the process to ascertain parameters, remembered them, went back out to revert to the original audio track, then applied noise reduction with the parameters I'd settled on. Did not enjoy, but as you said, hard to pile on too much when you're getting a free ride.

Same workflow for that operation as "CoolEdit Pro" before it.

Most audio apps - including CEP - group plugins by function.

TBF default groupings are often based on the function baked into a VST/AU by the designer, and some of those groupings are more useful than others.

But given that Audacity's plugins are largely homebrewed, I don't there's a good reason not to get this right.

I find these kinds of problems baffling. And it's not that they're exclusive to open source, because they really aren't. (I'm looking at you, Adobe...)

Some designers just don't seem to get UI concepts like making common workflows as streamlined and effortless as possible, minimising clicks and scrolling, efficient presentation of options with useful grouping, and watching non-dev users interacting with the software to find out what feels clunky and excessively complex to them.

IMHO alphabetical is much better if you already know what you want to do. I want to do Noise Reduction, I open the Effects menu and click on Noise Reduction, which I can find very quickly because it's alphabetical and I know the name. If it were sorted by category then I would have to know beforehand not just the name of the effect but also the category it's in, and from experience with other programs it can be pretty arbitrary/subjective/confusing to have to remember the plugin -> category mapping for every plugin I ever use. Otherwise I have to parse a bunch of categories and think "hmm, I wonder if they would put Noise Reduction in here..". Either way it's slower and more of a hassle.

The ideal workflow for that would be keeping open, until dismissed, a noise reduction GUI widget (like the ribbon in Microsoft Office or the side panels in Blender), guaranteeing that you only dig through the menu once per session; then selecting audio (or using an existing audio selection) and stating that it is the source or the noise reference; then apply and undo noise reduction after seeing that both mandatory inputs have been set.

Not rocket surgery, but a very deep UI redesign compared to a dialog box.

Indeed. I think I like Inkscape approach for that: you can just stack whatever you want in panes to the sides of the work area, this way you can keep the often used tools handy and easily swap them in and out as needed. It's fairly intuitive and rather flexible.

It's a traditional approach in image editors (other notable examples include Photoshop, CorelDraw, GIMP, Krita, Pixia, and as remarked in other comments AzPainter) but not in audio editors.

I blame the traditional prevalence of highly self-contained plugins and little scripts (for example, Audacity has Nyquist scripts) that entail generic host applications that only really care about the subset of features that cannot be delegated to plugins (for example, Audacity has the waveform view).

An ultrafast, pipe-able, set of Unix philosophy audio tools with a CLI interface would be great

Like... sox?

Sox is beautiful and way faster than GUIs (first comment ever!)

If sox could show you the waveform you're cutting.

I tend to agree, in a commercial sound control program like IzotopeRX one can set settings on a modal window while keeping the ability to control the main window. Also one can playback all previous states on the fly by clicking on a list of states, because it treats the process as a graph of Fourier states just like Gimp wants to create with GEGL. It is very important as a creator of a program with a complicated flow of tasks to let people feel that solutions are easy to accomplish. Now is Izotope easier as one imports only one track, but even Ardour in many ways is easier to handle than Audacity, and don't get me wrong, I love Audacity for what it does.

I use and like Audacity, but it really is clunky. Having to use separate "tools" to edit envelopes, move events, etc. is pretty clunky compared to, say, a DAW like ACID or a commercial audio editor like Soundforge. The active regions for hovers, clicks, and drags (e.g. to resize tracks) really need tweaking as well, and the horizontal scroll after a zoom change is also really hard to predict or control.

I feel as though early 2000s was the peak of UI, they took peak performance and made it look good enough

What about AzPainter[0] UI?

[0] https://git.io/azpainter

First impression: I don't know that software, never used it, not sure how it relates to the GP's post. I just felt like commenting.

It's not pretty and looks cluttered, but those are just looks. Those aside, it's probably perfectly serviceable for getting work done. I like UIs where everything is just there (or even where you put it), and you don't need to dig in submenus that may even make you wait for animations. You can build effective muscle memory for this. It also appears it will let you make use of multiple monitors easily.

It just doesn't look great because font sizes and spacing is really inconsistent across types of UI elements: buttons get lots of space to breathe with big paddings and margins for some reason, any bar has very little space and gets a tiny font, lists have fonts way larger than everything else, ...

Looks similar to the Corel interfaces, which were nigh-unusable if you were used to Adobe.

Perfect, exactly what I was thinking, also was reminded of some of the old erp systems that were fast as lightning and supported thousands of users without breaking, a little on the busy side but refreshing to have all the features accessible

The AzPainter screenshot is meant to showcase as many tools as possible. For real usage, most of them would be folded away or completely hidden.

I have tried a few times to use it and man is it bizarre and hostile.

SoundForge was fantastic. Now I just do everything in Reaper. Both non-free of course, but Reaper is really cheap and works everywhere and does so much more than just audio editing.

Edit: the love Audacity is getting in the comments inspires respect! There is obviously something that I missed...

SoundForge was quite capable back in the day. It was probably one of my first chances to "remix" works and probably helped shape my worldview (as weird as that sounds. Making music from music was a pleasure and not a 'bad' thing).

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