I think the video they've made explaining the whole process is really worth watching. Enjoyed it a lot.
A few months back I've downloaded the beta version and was kinda disappointed. I understand that switching to Qt will make future development much easier, but it wasn't addressing my main concern with Audacity.
When I decided to record an audio version of my book, I started with Audacity. But it quickly failed me when I started losing track of what files I was using, and if I deleted a file from the timeline, it was impossible to track what was what. All this because Audacity doesn't have a media manager. Instead, you have to open a folder on the side and manage media yourself. I've written a blog post about it, didn't get much traction. But as of a few days ago, one of the developers commented that a media me is "on our shortlist of new features to include".
I am really looking forward to version 4.0, I hope Audacity gets its Blender moment.
Audacity is a linear audio editor and you sound like you were trying to use it as a non-linear DAW, which feature bloat and undo/redo sort of but not really lets you do. A media manager does not really help in this sort of editor, your timeline is not an arrangement of files as it is in a daw but the actual audio file you are arranging and changes are destructive. Linear editing is like working with tape, your changes are permanent, every change alters the medium (the destination audiofile held in memory in this case); non-linear is like a sampler on steroids and is how DAWs function, you arrange the samples (files) in time and then record them out to a file when things are how you want it.
Audacity is fine for quick editing and merging tracks together but it's not ideal for more professional applications like music and narration production. It certainly could be used for those things but you're going to be stumbling over a lot of obstacles that have already been solved. Obviously you don't need anything like Ableton but there are other FOSS digital audio workstations that offer exactly what you'd need for editing audiobook narration. You're trying to layout a novel with a text editor.
Linear vs non-linear is kind of hard to describe in the modern era, we aren't splicing tape anymore, the original audio is still safe on the disk unless you overwrite it. It's really just that Audacity doesn't give you the kinds of features that a true non-linear DAW has. There's no reason why it couldn't have those features, it's just not the focus of what Audacity needs to be (simple audio recording and editing).
Audacity is not about simple audio recording and editing, it is about linear editing and can be more suitable than a DAW when it comes to heavy and complicated editing but it requires a different work flow. DAW is designed for production, mixing, mastering, and when applied towards editing you can find yourself with a full hard drive in surprisingly little time because every edit means the DAW creates another audio file.
The DAW did not solve anything, it just choose a different set of problems which are less of an issue for the tasks the DAW is designed for but can be fairly irritating if the tool you need is a capable editor. Something like recording an audiobook can be done effectively and efficiently in either a DAW or an editor and I can make a case for either. In the case of an audiobook, my choice would be to assemble it in an editor and polish it off in a DAW.
> DAW is designed for production, mixing, mastering, and when applied towards editing you can find yourself with a full hard drive in surprisingly little time because every edit means the DAW creates another audio file.
This isn't how the vast majority of operations work in the two DAWs I'm the most familiar with (Ableton Live and Logic Pro) work, most actions are non-destructive and don't result in extra files on your computer (e.g., the original file is referenced, and edits are applied on top of that without modifying the underlying audio file [a la Lightroom for photos]). There are certainly situations where new audio files are written, but it's usually crystal clear when you're doing so.
For the record, I agree with your overall point. DAWs abstract away a lot of the details of the underlying audio files, and there's definitely space for tools like Audacity that are designed to edit audio files staying closer to their export formats. So just clarifying that I wouldn't phrase the downside of DAWs (or at least not all DAWs) around creating a bunch of extra files (although I'd be curious to hear which DAWs actually do work that way [i.e., create new audio files based on edits], just for my own learning).
Most of what a DAW does are not edits, they are operations applied to a stream; they only create new files when you do actual edits. They do make it clear when a new file is created. In my experience when ever you start trying to use a DAW like an editor you either end up creating lots of files or start creating more work for yourself than it would be in a proper editor with all of its shortcuts and conveniences aimed at editing. Admittedly, it has been awhile since I have used a DAW for anything but simple recording and mixing, so it is quite possible I am out of date on how they deal with this stuff.
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