Improving the overall usability

[Tellus]

Hello!

We are a group of Information Processing Science students with a project where we should suggest enhancements to the usability of an OSS project. We would like to focus on Audacity because it's widely used and we also use it from time to time. How could we get somehow more involved with the developers and make this easier for us and helpful to you?

The goal of this project is to contribute to audacity and its users. We are going to give you suggestions based on our analysis of use cases and most used features and hopefully mock up prototypes. We hope you could be involved too and give us some feedback. You will be able to use our material to your best interest.

[steve]

As of tomorrow, Audacity is due to be in "code freeze" prior to the release of Audacity 2.0
If you register at the bottom of the Audacity home page you will be notified as soon as Audacity 2.0 is released.

Audacity 2.0 is very closely based on the current 1.3.14 version, but if you want to see a more recent snapshot you can download and test-drive the nightly (alpha) version from here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... tly_Builds
(note: the nightly builds are only available in ZIP format)

To save you from unnecessary duplication of effort, the current list of "Feature Requests" is here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Feature_Requests
There are also a number of "Proposal pages" that cover certain proposed features in more detail - search the Audacity wiki for the word: proposal.

You can e-mail the Audacity Team directly via the contact page on the main web site, though I'd suggest that you leave that until after 2.0 is released as everyone is likely to be quite tied up with the release just now.

If you have questions regarding current specific functionality in Audacity, we can probably answer all such questions on this forum.

[Edgar]

How could we get somehow more involved with the developers and make this easier for us and helpful to you?

As of tomorrow, Audacity is due to be in "code freeze" prior to the release of Audacity 2.0

Audacity has been in "feature freeze" (e.g. no functional changes to GUI and no major enhancements) for a very long time. Many of the ideas on the "feature request" page, to which Steve links above, are good candidates for work in the very near future. Obviously, as Audacity is open source and the Development Team Programmers do not get paid to do the programming, what any given Team Programmer works on is a personal choice; however, they can be lobbied (generically as a group) to work on specific bugs, features and enhancements. This is done by the informal "voting" on this forum and the more formal voting on the "feature request" page.

You may also join the Audacity -devel mailing list, see:
http://audacity.238276.n2.nabble.com/au ... 38278.html
for an online, read-only version. The developers who are active on the list can use it to hash out the programming aspects but in general do not do so very often.

Audacity also has a QA mailing list, see:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/foru ... ty-quality
for an online, read-only version, where it might be more appropriate to discuss areas where you think problems exist in the GUI or functionality.

There are also a number of "Proposal pages" that cover certain proposed features in more detail - search the Audacity wiki for the word: proposal.

This page:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Category:Proposal
is an index of most of the currently active proposals. Look through them to get an idea how the process works.

You might consider starting out with a committee approach on your end--y'all get together and work up a proposal after doing your own QA and design discussion. After you have something firmed up post it to this board's Adding Features to Audacity forum. Those of us who read and reply are active Audacity community members and might help with the final polish and moving your suggestion on to a feature request and/or proposal page. Eventually, the "committee chair" would get accounts to post to -devel & QA (members would read them online or get accounts but not post as the Developers do not like a lot of traffic on those lists).