Simplifying Audacity

Programming and Development Compiling Audacity
1

Hello,

I am trying to create a simplified version of audacity for the highly specialized purpose of simple speech recording by non-professionals. I am following the instruction
from http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/simplifying_audacity.html. I can successfully hide entire menus like Generate and Analyize, as well as certain sub-items by translating the strings to “!” (see attached screenshot). However, I cannot hide any of the items in the Effects menu - they just start to appear as “!”.

What is the correct way to accomplish this? Thanks!
effects-menu.png

2

I confirm your findings.

I would guess “simplifying” is not implemented for individual effects because of the way individual effect menu items are added on the fly, but that is no more than a guess. I’ll see if I can find anything out.

Note you can hide the entire effect menu by “translating” Effe&ct" as “!”.


Gale

3

James (the developer who wrote this feature) has made a fix for this. Please try it and post here if you have problems:
http://gaclrecords.org.uk/win-nightly/download.php?fname=./audacity-win-r12584-2.0.5-alpha-22-sep-13.zip .


Gale

4

Thank you for the quick fix!

I just tested it and can confirm it works fine now. Since we are planning to redistribute this simplified version (the custom en-simple translation and audacity.cfg), both for Windows and MacOSX, would you suggest:

5

Thanks for testing.

You could patch the 2.0.4 tag with r12584, but then About Audacity would show 2.0.4. That isn’t really correct because this would be a code change to 2.0.4 and not just the addition of an extra language folder and a modified .cfg. If you do that I would prefer you modify src/audacity.h so that it displays 2.0.5-alpha.

On balance I would suggest this time around that you redistribute this as 2.0.5-alpha based on the current HEAD code. That way you’ll get a fix for excessively loud dither and you’ll avoid the import crashes that are affecting some users on Mac. If you wait till 03:15 GMT tomorrow you can get a pre-compiled Mac binary from http://www.audacity.homerow.net/index.php?dir=mac/&sort=date&order=desc .

Note that if you use 2.0.4 for Windows or the Windows 2.0.5-alpha “nightly build” I posted, you may run into WDM-KS problems (though this is much rarer than the Mac issue). The only way round that at present is to disable WDM-KS, in which case you could distribute gaclrecords.org.uk if anyone has WDM-KS problems. That will not have the dither fix but won’t have the slight hang or crash risk.


Gale

6

Also I’d be interested in knowing the needs of the user group you are catering for and which menu items you are hiding.


Gale

7

Thanks for your reply,

We will go for using the latest pre-compiled binaries that you provide for both OSes, just adding the en-simple translation.

We are the team of audiolize.net – a platform for audio versions of online articles. We would like to offer to our network of “audiolizers” a simplified Audacity version, highly specialized for home speech recordings.

I will soon post a link to a compiled installer of the simplified version.
I attach the simplified .po file that we created after consulting with audio recording professionals. However, it will be very helpful for us to get some additional ideas - the goal is to provide non-professionals with the simplest possible UI for the purpose of speech recordings at home.
audacity.po.zip (44.5 KB)