Audacity 4 (alpha) feedback

[EddieD]

I’ve downloaded v. 4 and started it out. It said there to post feedback in GitHub but I couldn’t figure out how. So I’ll post it here and hope these will be addressed (or at the very least considered)

1. No m4a support (for import, it seems for export it does)
2. Dragging an m4a file in doesn’t give a message of no support. It just does nothing.
3. Color changing UX on tracks is not as clean as possible and is limited to very few colors
4. Zoom in with mouse-wheel without holding down Ctrl is missing
5. Spacebar plays/pauses. I was trying to pan (when zoomed in) with spacebar and drag. 2nd try worked (holding down shift and scroll). Scrolling alone seems to do nothing. This could be improved or at least the option in the preferences given… After a bit using it, the spacebar shortcut is quite helpful. A good alternative to the shift is middle mouse button drag to pan.
6. Can’t reposition the marker when the audio is playing. Have to stop playing, place marker and start playing again. Not good UX. (Being able to drag the position or click somewhere to place it, though, is good.)
7. Changing the volume could be more intuitive. Make vertical, make triangular (so bigger means louder), color change from green to red and putting an icon representing loudness. These things would help rather than a nameless horizontal bar that could mean anything.
8. When deleting a clip for the first time in the popup, choosing close gap: 3 options are great. The window opens only once (which is good) but the clarification that it’s only once and that it can be changed later in the preferences should be in the same popup not in a secondary one.. Also the shortcut message should be more distinct. Feels a bit overwhelming in a small popup.
9. It would be great to have a “delete before the cursor position” and “delete after cursor position” feature
10. It would be great to be able to put markers (without splitting) so for example play then put a marker, keep playing then delete (or do some other effect or whatever) between the marker and new position. Maybe as a visualization tool, when placing the first marker whenever the current position is, a selection between the two (whether before or after it) will become selected.
11. Where are jump back and jump forward buttons? Really need to move in small increments (and choose the increment length too)
12. When marking a selection by dragging, if the mouse moves out of the clip area vertically the clip is deselected and if letting go without noticing this, the selection is lost.
13. There is no crop option. There should be the ability to crop when selecting what is wanted rather than what is to be discarded.
14. I don’t see anyway to drag out the end of a cut clip to extend it a bit more or less to fine tune after the fact. (I came to this version from a video specifying this feature so maybe it will come).
15. A helpful feature would be to speed-play (not affecting the audio). This helps save time when traversing the audio without affecting changes
16. There should be the original time as well as the new time so if, for instance, I have a 10 min. clip and I delete the first half, then the start of the clip is originally 5:00 but is now 0:00. Both are useful, but it is important to clearly distinguish between them.
17. When i canceled a save, it threw an error that the file could not be created. This is incorrect behavior.
18. When exporting, there should be an option to keep the original media’s preferences and / or format as well as the original name which should be loaded as a default.
19. When loading / exporting or any other process that may take some time, it would be great to have the loading show in the start bar icon (maybe this is just a Windows feature?). This way, one can go do other things while keeping an eye out on the progress.
20. For a beta version (or alpha) it would be useful to have an icon to link to GitHub (or here, wherever is applicable) to give feedback quickly from within Audacity.

[steve]

Audacity 4 is still a long way from being “feature complete”. There isn’t really any point reporting missing features yet.

[EddieD]

right you are. well maybe a few of these are still relevant. UI wise.

[LeoWattenberg]

@EddieD

• No m4a support (for import, it seems for export it does)
• Dragging an m4a file in doesn’t give a message of no support. It just does nothing.

This is fixed in the latest master version

@EddieD

Color changing UX on tracks is not as clean as possible and is limited to very few colors

What is it you got stuck on? We’ve intentionally used some simple pre-defined colors instead of using a more complicated color picker. It’d help to see your use case where our current 9 colors are insufficient.

@EddieD

Zoom in with mouse-wheel without holding down Ctrl is missing

this never was a feature in Audacity. @teetow and I talked about it, and we’ve decided to keep Audacity 3’s behavior on the matter for now.

@EddieD

Spacebar plays/pauses. I was trying to pan (when zoomed in) with spacebar and drag. 2nd try worked (holding down shift and scroll). Scrolling alone seems to do nothing. This could be improved or at least the option in the preferences given… After a bit using it, the spacebar shortcut is quite helpful. A good alternative to the shift is middle mouse button drag to pan.

Space-drag never was a thing in Audacity, and given that space=play is the much stronger association, I don’t think it should be. Scrolling scrolls up and down the list of tracks, if you have more tracks than fit on screen. Middle mouse drag recently got added to 3.7 and should also be added to 4 soon.

@EddieD

Can’t reposition the marker when the audio is playing. Have to stop playing, place marker and start playing again. Not good UX. (Being able to drag the position or click somewhere to place it, though, is good.)

If you drag within a track, it allows you to make selections without interrupting playback. To jump during playback, click into the ruler above the tracks instead

@EddieD

Changing the volume could be more intuitive. Make vertical, make triangular (so bigger means louder), color change from green to red and putting an icon representing loudness. These things would help rather than a nameless horizontal bar that could mean anything.

If you’ve used things like Audacity 3 or video players like YouTube, this pattern shouldn’t be unfamiliar. A vertical mixer view is coming though.

@EddieD

When deleting a clip for the first time in the popup, choosing close gap: 3 options are great. The window opens only once (which is good) but the clarification that it’s only once and that it can be changed later in the preferences should be in the same popup not in a secondary one.. Also the shortcut message should be more distinct. Feels a bit overwhelming in a small popup.

The reason there’s 2 popups is precisely to not make the first one more overwhelming than it already is.

@EddieD

• It would be great to have a “delete before the cursor position” and “delete after cursor position” feature
• It would be great to be able to put markers (without splitting) so for example play then put a marker, keep playing then delete (or do some other effect or whatever) between the marker and new position. Maybe as a visualization tool, when placing the first marker whenever the current position is, a selection between the two (whether before or after it) will become selected.

It’s a different solution to what you’re proposing, but the split tool is pretty much trying to do just that: It allows you to click’n’drag to create a split which automatically gets the split selected and lets you immediately press delete to remove it.

@EddieD

Where are jump back and jump forward buttons? Really need to move in small increments (and choose the increment length too)

Arrow keys left and right; dedicated buttons for this never have existed in Audacity.

@EddieD

When marking a selection by dragging, if the mouse moves out of the clip area vertically the clip is deselected and if letting go without noticing this, the selection is lost.

This appears fixed in the latest master

@EddieD

There is no crop option. There should be the ability to crop when selecting what is wanted rather than what is to be discarded.

There is a “Trim” button you can enable in the toolbar settings which does just that. Alternatively, split the clip and remove the surrounding clips.

@EddieD

I don’t see anyway to drag out the end of a cut clip to extend it a bit more or less to fine tune after the fact. (I came to this version from a video specifying this feature so maybe it will come).

If you click on a clip header, little arrows will appear around it:

You can drag those to adjust (provided that there’s hidden content).

@EddieD

A helpful feature would be to speed-play (not affecting the audio). This helps save time when traversing the audio without affecting changes

Yes, that’s coming.

@EddieD

There should be the original time as well as the new time so if, for instance, I have a 10 min. clip and I delete the first half, then the start of the clip is originally 5:00 but is now 0:00. Both are useful, but it is important to clearly distinguish between them.

A little out of scope for Audacity perhaps (how would this work with multiple clips on multiple tracks, for example), but I see the use in it.

@EddieD

When i canceled a save, it threw an error that the file could not be created. This is incorrect behavior.

cc @dozzzzer @mugen2x

@EddieD

When exporting, there should be an option to keep the original media’s preferences and / or format as well as the original name which should be loaded as a default.

"Export to $1" File menu item

@EddieD

When loading / exporting or any other process that may take some time, it would be great to have the loading show in the start bar icon (maybe this is just a Windows feature?). This way, one can go do other things while keeping an eye out on the progress.

Probably worth figuring out sometime after the release of Audacity 4.

[EddieD]

Thanks for the breakdown. Let me mention that while I have used Audacity for years (can’t recall what version I started with) but I am an occasional user. My use cases tend to be simple edits and effects. I rarely use more than 1 or 2 tracks. I am, however, looking at it from a “what if” set of eyes so maybe some of this no one wants.

Some of these points are understandable for long time Audacity users but I’m very much like a new time user in my familiarity and some things are not quite obvious to me, as such.

I’ll skip the points that will be or are already fixed (yay for those).

• The color changing on tracks, like I said I don’t use many tracks. I don’t know if it is out of the realm of possibility that someone may want to, you probably know better. I don’t see the harm in giving the options. Also, I’m sensitive to how things look and if I can select my own shades it makes working with an interface more pleasant. The default color (pink) I just HAD to change (maybe I’m just an odd duck). I can conceive of a scenario where certain tracks may be somehow related and it would be beneficial to mark them by similar colors such as light green and dark green. Maybe there is no point to it though.
• The zoom with a wheel is a pet peeve of mine. I had this issue with Photoshop but it has in the settings an option to enable zoom with the wheel even though it’s not the default behavior. I do love my options, though I respect your choice of course.
• I’ll keep it in mind that clicking on the ruler will make the jump. From newbie point of view and for consistency of operation it still, I think, should work the same way when playing and when stopped like clicking on the track or dragging the position. Continuity matters. Dragging to make selections shouldn’t be affected, I think, if those are put into effect.
• About the volume meter, I looked again in the 3.7.7 I have, as I’ve mentioned I have used older versions and you are correct of course about that being an old design. Youtube, however does have a “Volume” icon which when clicked on opens the volume meter which is far more intuitive than an unnamed line. Winamp and VLC, likewise have visual cues. I can’t speak for every player out there, of course. I didn’t mean before all of the things I mentions are necessary, I just gave examples that could help with this. Any cue would work.
• The over-cluttering reason did cross my mind. I think, with the right placement and visual spacing a simple line can save the user from needing a second popup. It makes it frustrating when closing a popup just to be hit by another one. Psychologically speaking, it feels a bit spammy.
• Maybe you missed what I was getting at here, or maybe the other way around. While split can be powerful and useful, it also creates more parts. I think it makes for a cleaner working process, applying something to a selected part of a track without the need to split it. Then if you want to deal with it as a whole you don’t need to group or join back together which feels cumbersome if all you want is to do a simple change. The delete to this point would just be a slightly quicker way of working. Selecting, unless zooming in all of the way, can be very inaccurate which is why I think it is necessary to be able to select from or to the current playing position which can pinpoint by ear the exact place.I thought I recalled something like this in the previous version with a hand pointing at the location but just checking now I don’t see such a thing. Not sure what I’m remembering. Maybe VSDC.
• “Jump a bit” buttons are common for many audio and video apps so maybe that’s something worth considering even if it’s not legacy? As I’ve said this is insanely useful for pinpointing exact positions.
• Clicking the header. Cool. Just tried it out. Wanted to ask why not hover but I get it. When having 2 adjacent clips there is no way to determine which will be dragged so cool. However, when I tried dragging a clip out it “ate” into the next clip. Dragging it back did not restore the next clip. I would have thought a logical behavior would be to push the rest of the tracks. Maybe this was fixed already or is the intended behavior, though it is a weird one.
• That is a fair point. I thought maybe put the old time in each clip’s header as the other time is global to all but it seems fairly packed already and that would clutter the headers something awful. Maybe have the old time change to whichever clip the mouse is pointing at along with the title of the imported clip. Maybe even present it as a tooltip thereby forgoing added clutter to the UI.

[LeoWattenberg]

[quote=“EddieD, post:5, topic:151026”] I can conceive of a scenario where certain tracks may be somehow related and it would be beneficial to mark them by similar colors such as light green and dark green. Maybe there is no point to it though.
[/quote]

Aye. There is a term here called “overdesigning”, where you keep coming up with more and more hypothetical eventualities to cover, while in reality those hypotheticals never arise. It tends to lead to so many options that the app as a whole becomes incomprehensible for it. Because of this, we intentionally try to keep things as basic as possible for the initial implementation and expand them reactively depending on what we see used in user tests, online discourse etc.

@EddieD

owever, when I tried dragging a clip out it “ate” into the next clip. Dragging it back did not restore the next clip.

Indeed, that is by design. Your options are to either undo the move, or know how you can untrim clips (again, the arrows). We don’t know if restoring the eaten portion is desired, so we went with the simpler option to leave everything as-is. Though this is pretty similar to the delete with gap vs delete with ripple problem: Maybe we need a similar solution here, too. We’ll need to see with actual user tests though.

[EddieD]

I get that. Bogging a program down makes it big and slow and if not designed right also crowded and confusing.

I was thinking that myself, give an option like the other one whether to “eat” the next one, to push it or to overlap it. I’m curious what the user test will show.