You appear to have made up your mind, and I am of no mind to argue.
I am not arguing; It is called a technical discussion.
I have backed up my opinion with the view of a respected (by his industrial peers) colleague who, I think, happens to be a damn good engineer. I could not know what he would say. He could have told me I was utterly wrong and you guys were correct. I would have posted his opinion irrelevant of what he had to say on this issue. The only way to solve technical issues is to be completely open. When we worked together at TI we did not always agree but we always discussed and eventually resolved the issue to the benefit of all concerned.
I spent a great deal of time trying to formulate a balanced opinion.
I have offered you independent and impartial assistance which would not have been biased as you appear to be assuming.
You however respond to the considerable time I spent trying to assist by issuing a one liner dismissal and close the issue. That is okay by me.
During my career, many years of which I have been engaged as as a freelance consultant, I have made many seemingly outrageous statements to companies on technical issues. A classic was were I was engaged to resolve a hardware issue. After a few weeks I informed the company I thought the fault was a software issue and predicted the root cause as byte overflow due to a mathematical operation. No-one, but no-one, believed me however, as the unit was being deployed in a remote and inaccessible place the technical director decided he could not take the risk and so, due to pressure of work, they employed a contractor. Within a week the contractor had found the software issue I had predicted; the byte overflow was due to a wrongly coded multiplication operation.
At the time of writing I see Sombunya has not updated his ‘Noise’ post see: occasional noise whereby you state his distortion is due to the notoriously bad data corruption of USB links. I pointed him in the direction of this post. No response; maybe here is another potential customer you have lost!
In another thread on this forum, see: Audacity Recording Freeze at 38m 47.5s: Win7 we have been discussing Audacity Freeze, which again, you have not been able to reproduce. What is your solution? Remove the offending code from Audacity without resolving the underlying issue. Problem solved that is until the offending error raises it head in another area with further consequences. I have been there, done that, seen it all before. Be careful guys, life does not get better by burying your head in the sand.
Audacity is your product, it is your choice and, I fear, this will certainly be your loss. You have a great product. It is very straightforward and quite intuitively easy to use. Technically, I think Audacity is good. I am a degree (I know, a degree is just a piece of paper) qualified engineer with over 30 years experience in the industry working as a design engineer in fields as diverse as power generation, broadcast video, military communications, radar and mobile telecomms involving both base station and handset design. I think you can agree this is quite a varied and interesting portfolio. Anyone that knows me will realise I do not give compliments lightly and yet I have praised Audacity. I have only met a handful of damn good engineers in my 30 odd year career so it takes a great deal to impress me.
I have seen somewhere on the web you guys are contemplating turning Audacity into a commercial venture. Best of luck folks, and I really meant that, because the real world is damn hard nut to crack.