alt Hacker NewsI highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch!
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This video is simply excellent. Really shows the challenges involved.
His other videos are awesome too. He is an expert in making great software AND a great video creator.
Alternately, if you want to go on the same journey Keary (the person you mention) went on to form an opinion on what constitutes good vs. bad UX design in music/notation/DAW software, they've also put out a whole series of videos taking the piss out of the UX of most of the software in the field:
- Reason (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PFRyONURSo)
- Sibelius (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI)
- MuseScore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A)
- Dorico (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8)
So, they've realized podcasters and vloggers are a large part of their target audience. Then I believe they have to implement some models for speech restoration.
These days most people just Adobe Podcast Enhance and forget and, from what I've seen there isn't an open source GUI based tool for automated voice processing out there.
Must add that it's so awesome to have an open source Qt based audio editor on KDE Plasma that does not look like shit!
Yes, Tantacrul. Pretty weird story, a composer and programmer who absolutely roasted the UIs of well known sheet music dinosaurs Finale and Sibelius in hilarious diss videos on YouTube. Then he conceded a bit reluctantly that Musescore was the better of the lot, but still had plenty of opinions on how it could be better.
So the guitar tabs website which had then recently acquired Musescore offered him a job. Not just a job, but basically to be boss of the whole thing. Then they bought audacity, staffpad and Hal Leonard too. Then they bought out their private equity backer.
I can't think of any other time something good has come out of a private equity roll-up. They haven't enshittified it (from my perspective as a user anyway). It seems in the end these people just loved music more than they loved money.
Beat me to it, I was just about to post this. It's a really cool breakdown of what goes into supporting and modernising such old open source software.
Not trying to hate because a FOSS audio editor is great, but all of these UI improvements are carbon copies from conventional DAWs or video editors, invented 30 or so years ago. Like giving audio clips a header which lets you move them around, or letting you adjust the audio clip start/end by dragging the start/end of the clip, are not exactly revolutionary in 2026. Maybe Audacity will re-invent automation lanes next? I'm not against it. I don't see how any of this requires user studies and the framing as some kind of breakthrough though.
Damn this guy is well versed on the topic at hand. Really clear and nice video.
I don't even need to watch that video to be reminded of the tagline - "Audacity says no!". Agreed this is a great watch for pretty much any developer.
all of his videos are amazing
Indirectly related his video on music notation itself, "Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music"[1], is really good IMHO.
> Many people feel that western notation makes it unnecessarily hard to read music. If we want to sight read, learn music theory or just practice an instrument, surely there's a better way? Right? This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4