Rant: Website and Docs keep leading me to Windows/MacOS only products

Feedback and Discussion Forum
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This is a bit of a rant because while searching for plugins I ended up at a “sorry, not for linux users” message over and over.

The front page of audacityteam.org currently has a banner:

Denoiser: The smart noise removal tool for clean audio. Detect, reduce, and restore sound without artifacts.
Get it on MuseHub

So you click on “MuseHub”, then click on “Start free trial” (I guess this is an advertisement for a non-free plugin?) and then you get told “This product is not compatible with your device.”.

Bummer.

Then you find out that the whole “MuseHub” thing, whatever it is, is only for Windows and Mac people. So as a linux user, you must look elsewhere.

Let’s go back to audacity and check the FAQ.

The MuseHub is a gateway to creativity for any audio producer. It’s packed with the best free apps, sounds and effects for composing, producing or performing.

Seriously, what is this marketing crap doing here? Is Musehub paying for this? Is this advertising product placement within an FAQ? Also, don’t say “any” producer when you exclude everyone on linux.

Ah. Found it:

Is Audacity compatible with third party plugins?
Yes! As an open-source application many third party plugins have been developed for Audacity. Check out a list of some of our team’s favorite Audacity plugins at https://plugins.audacityteam.org/

Excellent. Let me go there.
Oh nice. I see at plugins.audacityteam.org, on the front page:

Plugin Suites: Recommended: MuseFX

Let me try that. They are recommended after all.
Click.
Nope, links back to MuseHub.

All right, let’s try elsewhere. I see there is a “Noise Removal and Repair” category.
What’s here:

  • MuseFX Noise Gate
    Nope. Links to MuseFX pack which links to MuseHub which doesn’t work.
  • MuseFX De-Ess
    Nope, also MuseHub
  • ReaFIR
    click… reaper.fm… click… "REAPER supports Linux on Intel and ARM architectures, and the Windows version works well with WINE. " I guess that is good.

So there are some linux plugins around, but they are a bit hidden, and the prominent linking to (and blatant hyping/advertising!) of musehub on the main audacity page, in the FAQ, in the documentation, is quite frankly, aggravating. Aren’t linux users first class citizens anymore?

I was also excited to hear about these “great new AI plugins for audacity” in the “How we’re redesigning Audacity” video, but at this point it’s probably pointless for me to even check them out, right? Sure, plugins.audacityteam.org has an AI plugins category, and it lists OpenVino and Nvidia Broadcast and there is no indication that they exclude linux users …

…for that I would have to do a few more clicks.

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it’s true, there’s very few linux plugins out there. Most that are you may find already in your package manager.

OpenVINO is available on Linux, and the snap version bundles it directly:

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It seems that @cobordism did not realize he is writing in a user forum, wher users try to help other users. Otherwise (s)he would not make us responsible for anything Muse (the producer of Audacity) did or did not…

But in general, (s)he is right: Linux support exists on a small scale only.

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Hi, thanks for responding.
Please allow me to clear up any misunderstanding. I was not holding you responsible for any of this. I was just ranting. The most I would expect is commiseration.

I didn’t know OpenVino was in snap, though I found things like this: Linux Installation | intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity | DeepWiki so I knew it must be possible somehow - but you wouldn’t know from following the audacity website.

But more generally, something rubs me the wrong way when I see commercial advertisement hidden in the FAQ of foss software where it doesn’t belong. Or take plugins.audacityteam.org, it sure looks like documentation. However it prominently “recommends” the muse plugins. Recommended by whom? Is this really a neutral recommendation, or is there commercial interest behind it? Because if there is, this is no longer documentation, it’s advertising.

Look, I don’t want to come across as overly angry or negative, I love audacity and think the team are doing a fantastic job. But Free Open-Source Software should remain market neutral in its stance. It’s documentation should be just documentation. It should read like Wikipedia, not like the website of a startup. It should not come bundled with specific commercial saas cloud services either. (for example, if the app in question has save-to-cloud-storage functionality, I expect to be able to select my own NextCloud instance).

I don’t know how else to say this, but the creeping presence of commercial interests around the software and its web presence makes me feel just a bit uneasy. The linux vs the rest distinction was the primary reason I noticed it - and it often is that, because it is mostly commonly commercial software that avoids linux, not FOSS - and while my rant was centered around that, I now realise that my main unease and discomfort was this wider issue.

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Hi fellow Linux user,

Is there anything in this list that might suit your needs?

* Linux Musicians
* Linux Studio Plugins

I agree that we get a raw deal in terms of software availability compared to Windows and MacOS.

Judging by other posts on this forum, you are not alone in being troubled/exasperated at being steered towards paid products.

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The Audacity plugins page is technically a wiki (contribution info), though most of the site was made by me. I was paid by muse when I made it (at the moment I’m not).

The context for the plugins page was the launch of Audacity 3.2, which featured realtime effect capability, but which did not ship with an appreciable amount of plugins. So I went about and found some plugins to recommend. I share in principle your aversion to overly commercialized software; there’s a load of them out there on “free VST” sites which are heavily crippled versions of “pro” plugins, which remind you at every step that you’re using the free version.

My recommendation for the MuseFX came from 3 places:

  1. It is something in-house. This means that if they break, we can get the developer (the StaffPad people) to fix it with some priority.
  2. It’s a reasonably-sized pack of effects, which covers quite some use cases.
  3. The effects themselves are extremely simplified. Their original target audience are composers, ie people who are yet one more step removed from signal theory than Audacity users would be. As such, I am reasonably confident that anyone who uses them will be able to get something out of them (even though if you know more specifically what you want, they fall flat).

That it’s Windows/Mac-only and closed source didn’t bother me too much – Linux usage of Audacity is, afaict, orders of magnitude lower than the other two platforms, and I expected Linux users to search in their distro’s repo instead of the site anyway.

Unfortunately, said commercial saas cloud service is paying for the development of Audacity. IIRC our official stance on supporting alternate providers was that anyone was willing to make other integrations, we’d ship them, but we wouldn’t develop them ourselves. Though by the looks of things, the distros are stripping that feature anyway, so ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

A commercial interest being involved is not something I find problematic per se, but their business practices I do. There could be a world where Audacity continues to evolve to a fully-fledged easy-to-use DAW and which has MuseHub become a sort of “Steam for audio”, though at the moment it feels more like the future is one which treats Audacity as mere ad space, until its users get tired of the ads and fork away.