In my last thread, I showed off Soundscaper as Audacity 4 in the browser. Since then, a lot has happened.
Soundscaper is mostly on par with Audacity 3’s feature set. Almost all of the features missing from Audacity 4 have been added. This includes macros, play at speed, various effects, timed/sound-activated recordings, LADSPA/VAMP plugins, and more. The only things that have been intentionally omitted are MIDI support, sync-lock (replaced with ripple editing and clip grouping) and the transport menu (relevant options are now dropdowns near the play/record button).
Soundscaper has a desktop version now which can be downloaded from the releases page. NB, these versions are not yet signed/notarized, so they’ll be flagged as potentially unsafe if you try to install them.
Soundscaper has a lot more features than Audacity. This includes:
A project bin where you can move clips and files to for storage outside the timeline
Video tracks, to aid with dubbing production
New effects: Multiband compressor, de-esser, parametric EQ, bitcrusher. Also, various Audacity effects have been made realtime-capable.
Standard DAW features: Markers, send buses, group buses, automation, etc.
Soundscaper remains fully compatible with Audacity. This includes AUP/AUP3/AUP4 imports, AUP4 exports, as well as macro/effect preset compatibility.
The automatic test suite has expanded a lot. This isn’t to say that Soundscaper is bug-free right now (it most certainly isn’t) but in principle, bugs should be getting rarer and rarer.
And most importantly:
Soundscaper is a non-profit now
I have spun off Soundscaper from my company kw.media into a non-profit association called Mindscaper. You can join this association if you think that something Audacity-shaped would be better off in the hands of a non-profit rather than a for-profit company.
My goal for Mindscaper is for it to be a home of creative software similar to Audacity. A video editor, Framescaper, already has been in the works in parallel to Soundscaper as to me, video and audio really are just two sides of the same coin. After that, who knows – maybe we can challenge the entirety of Adobe CC.
I really want to use Soundscaper.
However, you’ve made fundamental operational choice that I simply won’t overlook.
Using the Spacebar to Play/Stop should not send the cursor to the beginning of the track.
Yes, I know there is also Stop and Set Cursor (presently assigned to X).
The default function of Play/Stop should be to leave the cursor where it is.
Your choice goes against UX.
I admire what you’re doing with the Soundscaper fork.
I can’t do what you do as a programmer; full respect.
I downloaded Soundscaper and gave it a try a few days ago. It definitely has a ways to go before it’s ready for action.
For one, the spectrogram will not show up properly for me. It just shows a rainbowy orange and yellow blob. The wave form doesn’t look especially great either. And, if I switch back and forth between wave view and spectrogram, sometimes neither shows at all.
Also, when playing back audio, when the cursor reaches the end of the screen and the window updates with the new waveform, I get a bad glitch / lag in the sound.
Also, for some reason, it will not load .m4a files.
There are probably other issues, but that’s all I saw before I gave up. I didn’t even try setting my keyboard shortcuts. That is still not working properly in Audacity 4.0.1.
@codetonic@beat_truck thank you two so much for testing! I’ll be having a version with all of these fixes ready for you tomorrow.
Fixed.
I fixed this some days ago, if you were using the download version it wouldn’t have gotten there yet.
It worked well on my system, but I do have a reasonably high-end machine so it might just be a timing/performance thing. I’ve been focusing much of today on performance, so this might improve in the next desktop build.
Soundscaper handles these files very differently to Audacity. It first tries out the Browser’s codecs, then OS level codecs, and if they’re missing it tries using the ffmpeg.exe (as opposed to audacity, which uses FFmpeg’s dll’s directly). There was a bug where the FFmpeg fallback didn’t work which is now fixed, but if you just have the “FFmpeg for Audacity” version of FFmpeg, it won’t work.
the good news is that Soundscapers shortcut system is completely separate form Audacity’s, so this bug shouldn’t carry over.
My machine is far from high end (an older i5 with 16gb of RAM and a 256gb SSD running MX Linux), but it still does everything I throw at it pretty well.
I do have to say thank you for all the work you are putting into this. I am excited to see a future alternative to Audacity, which frankly IMO has gone down the toilet since Muse stepped in. I have actually been using Tenacity for quite a while now because Audacity has been nearly unusable on my machine due to bugs that never get fixed.
