Older blog entries for habes (starting at number 2)

15 Jul 2002 (updated 15 Jul 2002 at 22:36 UTC) »
Audacity is getting major publicity this week!

First off, we hit 1,000,000 downloads, which are mostly from the last year and a half. That was exciting.

Then Audacity was mentioned on the TechTV program "The Screen Savers." I got it on tape this morning: an incoming caller wanted to know a way to do noise reduction on mp3s, and the hosts recommended Audacity and brought up the web page. That was even more exciting.

Then today I noticed Audacity was reviewed in the Washington Post! That was the most exciting of all. (well, besides sharing a front page slashdot story a few weeks back).

Please accept my apologies for bragging, but these are exciting times.

Audacity 1.0 is released! This is exciting for so many reasons. The two biggies:
  • we can forget about the 1.0 branch now. The 1.1 branch is so much better that maintaining 1.0 was becoming a pain.
  • a bunch of subprojects that we were putting off for the release are now progressing full speed ahead. The most exciting one is a split of the GUI and audio engine modules: this allows us to write rigorous tests to hammer at the audio engine code, as well as opening up the opportunity to implement alternate GUIs on top of libaudacity.

I finally have internet at home, which means I can do all the things I've been planning: a PortAudio implementation for JACK and/or ALSA, a media player for PicoGUI using gstreamer in Python, and who knows what else. Now that I have weekends the sky is the limit. Unfortunately I've gotten too used to working 10 and 11 hour days, so I don't have too much time during the week...

24 Apr 2002 (updated 24 Apr 2002 at 10:12 UTC) »

This week I took time that I didn't have to code two long-overdue features for Audacity: Ogg exporting and command-line exporting. There was no good reason why I hadn't written these features yet and I got tired of Audacity not having them, so I caved and tabled all my homework (including "compose a three voice fugue") to write these new features.

Ogg exporting is working nicely, and though command-line exporting works fine for me on my little-endian Athlon, I forgot to add code for byte-swapping the WAV header. Matt wisely suggested I dump my custom WAV code and just use libsndfile like the rest of the PCM exporting code does. Though it won't be as efficient since we have to copy the data in and out of libsndfile's buffers, the robustness and reliability will be worth it.

The gap between Audacity's 0.9 branch (which we are releasing from these days) and the 1.1 branch (which we are hacking on) is becoming wider all the time. The 1.1 branch has so many significant improvements over the 0.9 branch that I wish we could dump the 0.9 branch completely. But then we would lose some of the freedom to make drastic changes on a regular basis, so it's probably a good thing in the end.

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