I’m old school and play with very few pedals. A overdrive and echo are enough. You’ll find me at Church plugged straight into the Amp.
I like some synth music. But it can get repetitive after several songs.
It would be fun to cover the Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams in a band someday.
I only know about half of these hits.
https://electrozombies.com/magazine/article/35-essential-synth-pop-songs-of-the-history/
A rather off topic note: but in Fred Hoyle’s ‘Black Cloud’ SF novel the superintelligence asks us to send it some music since it hasn’t heard any yet. They send it Ann Halsey’s piano performance of Beethoven’s opus 106 piano concerto.
And then it asks them to repeat the first part at 30% faster…and Ann later remarks that the score has a metronome setting much faster than any human player could manage…
If you haven’t read the book it is a wonderful piece of realistic science fiction! Some of the technology is a bit dated now, but most of the science is bang on!
Oh, interesting. I suspect that’s why Audacity is now pushing on-line storage. I’ve been using it for years. I actually think it’s easier to use now than it was ten years ago. It comes with LAME already available, and a lot of the names of functions are clearer.
But maybe I won’t jump on any future updates.
I learned Musescore a few years ago. The learning curve isn’t too steep. There are good YouTube tutorials. I’ve forgotten a lot and would need a refresher.
I hope they don’t make Audacity that complicated. The beauty of the App is any podcaster can swiftly trim the beginning and end of the audio and fix minor audio clicks and pops before publishing. The podcaster doesn’t want to spend hours watching YouTube tutorials.
I have the newest stable version of Audacity installed and already see new features. I may be on YouTube again learning.
There’s already a Beta available that I haven’t looked at.
I know my music theory teacher lamented the use of sampled instruments. He could hear the difference on even the most advanced fake strings, for example.
Synths and such all at least don’t try to perfectly mimic real instruments. That helped them find their place. But still, the highest quality orchestral music or similar genres always use real instruments. It’s even presented as a feature in, say, video game background tracks.
I reread my OP. Hmm, I was a bit grouchy.
Let me explain.
Legitimate Installers will open a window with a Options Tree. You can click Full Install and get everything the developer wants to dump on your Drive.
Or, you Click Custom Install. You uncheck the optional Apps you don’t want.
This was standardized by 1987. I remember
installing Lotus and Word Perfect in 1988 on pc’s at work. Custom installs were our normal procedure That continued into the 90’s and 00’s with Microsoft. Installing software was a big part of my job.
I downloaded Audacity’s Win 64 bit Installer. The Name looked ok. The exe didn’t say Audacity but Muse Hub and that is a name associated with the company.
There is no Install menu. It installs everything with one mouse click.
They expect us to squint and find the correct installer.
That, my friends is irritating.
With all due respect, complaining about something that is free is futile. They can do whatever they want with their free software. There are plenty of alternatives that are far less annoying, but you’ll have to pay for those.
As an open source project with very many people contributing over the years, Audacity painted itself into a difficult corner with regard to technical changes; there was a sort of tragedy of the commons thing happening - although any of the small changes, bugfixes and feature additions might seem to have made perfect sense on their own, they all added up to taking the product in a direction that made it harder and harder to maintain, and impossible to take advantage of better frameworks and solutions that had arisen elsewhere.
Martin Keary AKA Tantacrul on YouTube and elsewhere, has been steering the development of Audacity as head of software at Muse - this intervention has been controversial, but IMO, he really does know his stuff; there’s a video here where he tries to explain the rationale for some of the changes
Edit: the above video does start off with a fair bit of sarcasm…
I’m interested in Audacity’s new development. MuseScore is a very nicely made Sheet Music editor.
It’s especially good for quckly writing down a new catchy, hit tune’s intro. It’s usually 4 to 6 bars of information and 20 minutes later the printed page is neatly lying on my music stand for guitar practice. Thanks Musescore!
Their company’s development team will probably surprise everyone with a few new features in Audacity and make it more modern.
btw, I’ll pass along my cool, old man, uncle trick for you.
For free.
Pay attention to the music your relative is listening too. Make a mental note of the songs title.
Many songs have a hook to immediately grab the listeners ears. Stars Wars for example. Everyone can hum that.
Its typically less than a dozen notes.
I use a cheap, mini keyboard to find the notes by ear. Scribble it down or use Musescore.
The next time the relative visits, casually mention hearing a new song. Use the cheap keyboard or guitar. Hum. Whatever.
I never want to be the grumpy uncle in the recliner. Glaring because they’re talking and I can’t follow the basketball game.
It’s hard making any meaningful connection with someone 50 years younger.
I try and at least attempt to be less intimidating and approachable. It doesn’t help that I’m 6 ft 2 in and over 220 lbs.
I must look like Mount Rushmore to my 10 year my nephew.
Smiling helps too. Doesn’t matter if my back is bothering me. I can smile for the hour they are visiting with my relatives.
Maybe then, when I’m gone and in the ground they’ll mention my name once in awhile.
Uncle Ace, played Taylor Swift.
Not a bad legacy. I guess.
It’s not you… in the software industry, we call this a “dark pattern”, and companies utilize it on purpose in order to trick you into doing something you wouldn’t normally want to do, while giving themselves a thin veneer of plausible deniability. “The opt out button was right there all along! Not our fault you didn’t see it!” (even though it was in a tiny font in a different color and designed to be less visible) Often times there will be internal pushback from the more ethical designers and developers against implementing something like this, but inevitably the suits and businesspeople will demand that it be added, and if you won’t do it, we’ll find someone else who will.
Many formerly totally free-as-in-no-if-and-buts software like Audacity, MuseScure, 7zip, CheatEngine, etc. suffer this fate. At least in Audacity’s case, it ended up in the relatively mission-aligned hands of MuseGroup instead of some malware operator or venture capital shark. It’s easy to blame projects that “sell out”, but really, it is a hard, hard thing to maintain a major free software app over time. What happened to Audacity, while understandably annoying, is probably at least better than some of the alternatives could’ve been (abandonment, malware, in-app adds, subscriptions, etc.).
I tried to watch parts of the video, but it’s quite long and rambly. Any particular highlights you’d like to point out?
Personally, the v4 alpha looks good to me. I like the cleaner UI. While the bundled installer is annoying, at least MuseGroup isn’t, say, Adobe, and I’m willing (maybe even a bit excited) to see the forthcoming changes to Audacity. If it turns out a dud, well, somebody will probably spin off Audacity 3 into its own fork, like happened with OpenOffice/LibreOffice and uBlock/uBlock Origin.
The phrase is comparatively new, but the behavior is ancient. For example, P. T. Barnum’s “Great Egress” (1841).
The technical debt section is important. People need to understand that in order for the product to stay relevant and have any kind of future development, there’s some fundamental stuff that must be sorted out.
Heh, great anecdote. Thanks for sharing!
That was enlightening, thanks.
I didn’t realize they were switching their entire UI framework. That’s a huge deal… given that, I’d be very surprised if Audacity 4 launched with feature parity with its predecessor. It’s a huge risk they’re taking.
Also, managing real-time playback across the Linuxes, Windows, and macOS is no easy task. It gets even more complicated with HDMI or Bluetooth outputs. I don’t envy the Audacity devs at all 
Hard, hard road ahead of them, and I would expect a lot of user angst along the way…
I’ve never fully understood todays Audio hardware in laptops and tablets.
There were high-end audio card options in the 90’s.
The cheapest was the 8 bit Sound Blaster. That came as a kit with the cd-drive, ISA expansion board and drivers. I made side-money installing them in the generic IBM pc’s that didn’t included audio.
I had a better audio board that was 16 bit audio. The brand was Pro Audio something, and it came with a PCI expansion board. It supposedly had better, 16 bit windows drivers.
Are sound chips in laptops all vanilla fudge today?
Is there any high-end, audio chip-set that should be selected in a Custom Dell build?
I think if you’re doing professional/semi-pro audio on a PC, the sound interface will be an external appliance of some kind.
USB-C or the Firewire port would have the speed for external audio hardware.
Firewire is faster.
Or has Optical Out (S/PDIF) finally become the gold standard? I haven’t seen many laptops that are connected with that port.
That means an extra gadget box and cable on the table next to the laptop.
Sampled instruments do sound pretty fake, but there are a lot of great songs that incorporated a Mellotron.
You have a gadget/box connected to your computer via let’s say USB, and all the XLR, TRS, S/PDIF, etc. all plug into that, not your laptop.
So, the digital pathways can all be done trivially in CPU now (or GPU, for the more demanding AI-assisted filters). That part doesn’t need an dedicated sound processor anymore; computers today are so much more powerful that it’s easy for them to do all that.
Where there’s still a difference is in the digital-audio conversion. You can find some desktop motherboards (primarily gamer-oriented, I think) with somewhat better DACs, but it’s easier and better to just get an external device (where electrical and radio interference and isolation are easier to manage). Technically they also still do make PCI Sound Blaster add-in cards (and maybe Turtle Beach might have a few? not sure), but those won’t do you any good on a laptop. I think Apple Silicon Macbook Pros also tend to have better DACs than most PC laptops, but if you’re already used to Windows, it’s overkill to switch just for that.
Actually S/PDIF, in PC contexts, is more or less obsolete now. Same with Toslink/optical. It’s much more common to find HDMI out, or the old-fashioned TRS stereo cables for desktops and some laptops. Firewire is similarly obsolete (and usually slower), and USB-C should be faster unless your laptop is really, really old and using one of the very old USB standards. USB-C only describes the physical shape of the connector; it’s the USB version underneath (like 2.0 vs 3.0 vs 3.2 SuperMegaDuperUltraSpeed or whatever… it’s terribly confusing and a whole different can o’ worms), along with your equipment compatibility and cable quality, that determines the speed. In the future I expect everything to be USB-C or Thunderbolt.
The tricky part is interfacing with musician equipment (MIDI, XLR, etc.). PCs have their own sound setups, TVs another, and most consumer-oriented home speakers kind of coexist between the two with a bit of cross-pollination. Pro musician equipment though usually uses an entirely different set of connectors and protocols and you need specialized devices to interact with them from a PC desktop or laptop.
Anyhooooow… the TLDR is this: From what I know (but someone correct me if I’m wrong): If all you’re doing is manipulating other people’s audio files that you’ve downloaded digitally to begin with, you don’t really need a fancy sound card. A good set of PC speakers, especially non-Bluetooth ones, will give you MUCH more bang for the buck. The small differences in DAC quality are not noticeable unless you have both very high quality equipment and very good hearing. If you’re running a professional recording studio it might matter; for home use it almost certainly won’t.
Bluetooth often (but not always) degrades audio quality, depending on the specific version, and is often compressed (both in frequencies and in digital transmission, lower quality in many ways). S/PDIF may be digital but it’s quite rare to see it today (the demand just wasn’t great enough, I guess), and audio over HDMI does mostly the same thing. But honestly, a good pair of speakers over your generic stereo cable is going to sound much better than your laptop speakers anyway.
(Edit: And if you don’t have an audio out, just get an external USB sound card with an output. I don’t think the differences between USB and Firewire speed are going to matter; audio, especially stereo, is tiny compared to video and most ports can handle it trivially)