Just want to give a shout-out to Audacity, which as far as I'm concerned is the open source creative tool that actually achieves the promise of open source creative tools. It gets significantly better every release and releases every few months, and the UI gets better and better (the key thing most open source tools don't achieve). If you tried Audacity a few years ago or more and decided it was unstable or clunky to use, download the latest version. You might be pleasantly surprised.
@darius These are true words.
@darius used it the other day to record some audio for a friend. it Just Works
@darius Absolutely. I literally just upgraded my Audacity a week or so ago and it was intense how much better it was!
@darius We'd like to also give a shout-out to the video recording/streaming equivalent: OBS Studio.
Being new to the whole streaming thing (though pretty experienced with software in general), OBS Studio has proven to be easy enough to get started, while also being versatile enough to do extremely complex things.
@KitsuneAlicia Oh yeah OBS is like top-tier, it's so good!!!
@KitsuneAlicia @darius will check that out... never heard of it before but now i see its installed in my newly upgraded ubuntu studio 20.04.
we've always used kdenlive and find that really good and also very easy to use. do you have any experience of OBS vs kdenlive? or are they for different things?
@radicalresilience Sorry, our only experience is with OBS Studio, so we don't really have any answers any of your questions.
@radicalresilience A quick search shows us that kdenlive is a video editor. OBS Studio is just for streaming/recording and doesn't have editing capabilities.
@KitsuneAlicia oh i see its completely different things thanks
@darius im happy for how many oss art tools are treating ui like an actual thing to deal with these days.
@darius audacity is one of those rare pieces of Good Software
@darius ooh, i haven't updated it in a year or two. I'm gonna try it RIGHT NOW
@ranjit One thing they improved 2 years ago is touchpad support, you can now zoom around the waveform effortlessly using horizontal two-finger scrolls and the like
@darius Thanks for the heads-up!
audacity used to work well here, but has gotten a bit crashy and buggy recently
not to say it isn't extremely useful, but
@darius I've been using it recently for vinyl transfers. While it still doesn't do everything I would like -- sndio was limited to the single, default device, and multiple instances were blocked -- it worked very well for me within those limitations.
@darius I don't know why I assumed that... of course it's cross-platform. Doh!
@darius I am thrilled to hear this. I haven't used it in years, but at the time I did find it a bit clunky.
@darius haven’t used it in over 10 years. Will have to give it another go!
@darius
A good shout out. I've used it at least decade & never failed me. As far as I'm concerned, it's an industry standard.
@darius KiCad hit a similar rhythm a couple of years back, and is doing a great job of making PCB design much easier
@darius I like Ocenaudio's interface a little more than Audacity. It doesn't seem to quite have the depth of functionality Audacity does, but I greatly prefer it for simple cut/paste jobs, or light normalisation and noise reduction passes.
@darius I found Audacity a few years ago and used it successfully to record all of my family's old Christmas albums to digital. I ripped during work and then cut in the evenings. It took time but the Dublin's were delighted to get old classics from childhood--some of which they hadn't heard since childhood--on a USB stick in the mail.
My main Audacity tip is to learn to use the multi-tool. It is a mode of interaction where you can hold down keyboard buttons to toggle what the mouse/trackpad does. Learning it took a few minutes, getting comfortable with it took a few hours, and it increased my working speed roughly 2X.
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/multi_tool.html