Hello, my name is Elias. I’m a voiceover artist, so after a few months of using Audacity as my main software, I have a few recommendations that would make my workflow much easier.
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Change playback speed function to playback tempo (why on earth do we need to hear Alvin the Chipmunk if we just want to listen to our audio quickly to listen for mistakes)
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Modern color, style, themes, etc. (C’mon, Audacity looks old. It’s time to graphically bring it into the future at least a bit)
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Shortcut Keys for individual functions within effects (I want to be able to assign a short key for the “get noise profile” button within the noise reduction effect, and this should apply to other effects/generated noises, etc.)
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Live delete (deleting selected audio without pausing)
That’s all for right now, please let me know what you think.
1: Audacity’s time stretch algorithms are somewhat old/unoptimal at this point and a replacement is being discussed: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/1524. Once a conclusion has been reached, that may affect the play-at-speed functionality too.
2: We want to make Audacity look much more pretty, however, the current UI system doesn’t lend itself well to looking super good. It’s from 1992 and the current version still supports Windows 98! So instead of trying to salvage anything in the current system, we’ll probably need to remake all the UI stuff from the ground up at some point.
3: I’d like to have some more background for that. Noise reduction is a tad cumbersome to use, yes, but how often do you actually use it per project? Do you apply it to everything in one pass, or do you identify noise per section, or per take, or…? Also, are you aware you can apply the noise reduction immediately by pressing ctrl+r once you’ve identified the profile?
4: I’d like more background for this, too. What do you need to delete while playing for exactly?