I'm really happy with what I've managed to accomplish on Audacity in the last month or so. Everyone is starting to itch for a new stable release, so I have been working on trying to knock the audio i/o into shape in time for 1.2. A few months ago we moved to a thread-based model for audio i/o that decreased latency and improved resourse utilization, but there were some kinks that it took some time to discover and diagnose.

Audacity can now build against PortAudio v19. PortAudio v19 is still unfinished, but it will have the ability to support OSS, ALSA, and JACK in a single build (all natively)! I was hoping this would be finished in time for Audacity 1.2, but since it won't our audio i/o is #ifdef'd to support either v18 or v19.

Looking for Summer Work

I would really like another internship this summer. Initially I placed a lot of eggs in the RealNetworks basket, since I figured my experience with Audacity would make me a prime candidate. But Real is a wall of silence: I never heard a word back from them. I need to pursue it more proactively.

I also need to think of other places where I could find work. I would like to stay in the Seattle area if possible (though I would willingly relocate like I did last summer), and hopefully I could find something having to do with audio or multimedia in some form.

Sometimes I worry that choosing work in a field similar to the work I do on free software will force me to close off part of myself and my knowledge to the free software community. I half-heartedly approached employees of Syntrillium (makers of CoolEdit) last week at a presentation and asked if they hired interns. When I said I was interested in programming they blew me off and said that wouldn't really be possible. But what if they did have internships available? It would be extremely similar work to what I do on Audacity, would I be forced to sign NDAs and wall off the insider knowledge of Syntrillium products to the work I do freely?

It seems difficult to find employment opportunities that would utilize my free software experience.