What books would you fellows recommend, related to Audacity?
NB: I am not so much interested in studio techniques, developing my ear, becoming an Audacity user guru, etc. as in writing software for Audacity.
I have the basic background covered: dual degrees in EE and CS, but have been writing software (developing my CS half, completely away from EE or signal processing half) since graduation.
TIA,
-RFH
How familiar are you with C++?
Are you familiar with wxWidgets?
I make a living programming in C++. I have been using its parent, C, since the White Book:
At the time, circa 1990, there was no such thing as object oriented, but my remedy was to learn Java (and currently C#) on my own.
I hurry to add that my day job is to develop software used to design steel poles (Civil and Structural Engineering, the farthest from the major/specialty close to my heart: EE).
I once hired a guy who was top-notch, heavily involved in the wxWidgets project, to develop a GUI multi-platform application that I designed. Have all the source code somewhere. My job was to compile and link, but found a bug that Mr. Guru had given up. I hope they have fixed all the linking issues by now.
-Ramon
I doubt that you were learning Java in 1990 
A good place to start would be to read up on wxWidgets 2.8 (currently used by Audacity) and wxWidgets 3.x (Audacity is likely to upgrade to wxWidgets 3 in the near future), and to start familiarising yourself with the Audacity code base (Redirecting to: https://www.audacityteam.org/download).
There is some information in the Audacity wiki that is relevant for new Audacity developers: Missing features - Audacity Support
(1) Hence the qualifier “circa”.
(2) How can you be so sure?? Maybe “Ramon F Herrera” is an alias for James Gosling? 
Okay, enough wise cracks… I have learned that people tend not to read long posts and thus try to summarize — Sometimes I overdo it (not unlike Noise Removal techniques). My point is that I got out of college with a terrible (in my mind) deficiency: Object Oriented Programming, which was a matter of research then. Placed that in my “Things to Learn” long list.
Which brings me to this point…
What bugs me terribly is the state of the art of noise reduction/removal. It is awful ! I was saying to myself: “How is it possible that a program written by all those Russian geniuses (Sound Cleaner II) or MIT hotshots (iZotope RX4) can produce such unnatural output? Don’t they know that -save for Stephen Hawking- the vocal chords are incapable of generating such voice?”
Like a good chef (which always takes a little taste now and then), shouldn’t Voice Removal include a Voice Recognition phase? Since this is far from being interactive, the computer can be left all night, in a loop:
• Apply these settings x=1.23, y=3.45, z=56dB, come up with a new tentative show
• Perform Voice Recognition on the result
• Does this sound like something uttered by the human throat?
• If negative, go back, try a new set of parameters.
These are the kinds of questions in which I am interested.
My inquiry about books (I am pretty much interested in voice, non-singing) stands.
-Ramon
Found one:
http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Signal-Processing-Acoustics-vol/dp/0387776982/
$540 <== Ouch!
That price needs to be restored…
Here’s another:
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/0-306-47042-X_4
(when they sell you individual chapters, you know the full book ain’t cheap)
This one is free (of charge, not necessarily hassle):
This is the same book above, but free of hassle:
http://patriot.net/~ramon/misc/Comparison-of-Audio-Restoration-Algorithms.pdf
-RFH
Here’s a good (free) introduction to DSP: http://www.dspguide.com/
Lots of other resources here: http://www.musicdsp.org/links.php
If you are interested in voice analysis, have a look at Praat: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/