What is the Roadmap for Audacity?

[Ted]

It was announced today that the next version of Audacity (v3.2 scheduled for release around late September) will include support for realtime effects. Finally!

Give the Audacity team another couple of decades, and Audacity could become a serious DAW!

But seriously, folks: What is Audacity's vision and roadmap? Does anyone know? Is it published somewhere on their website?

I find the application really useful. It touches every song I ever record. I think of it more as a toolkit, not a one-stop solution. It's a little like bringing my own spices to a full-service restaurant. (Micro BR or Garageband are the restaurants, Audacity provides the spices the restaurants don't quite get right.)

If the team intends for Audacity to become a one-stop DAW, they are a long way from it. When I see Audacity mentioned in recording forums, it's never portrayed as a first choice; always portrayed as the poor-person's choice: If you can't afford good recording software, there's always this clunky thing that'll do the job eventually – if you're willing to deal with its limitations and idiosyncrasies.

I'm a big fan of open source solutions. I work with a nonprofit that publishes open source mobile applications. So I understand very well the dread that proprietary solutions will make us irrelevant if we don't keep up with what users need. But I've never had the sense that Audacity sees itself as a player in the DAW space. It's always seemed like the DAW of last resort, and a tweaker's playground.

[Zoltan]

Yeah, i don't know how they have such an audacity. I agree. It's often seen as poor mans choice and although it is useable and getting better. It's also quite dire compared to those more fully featured DAWs. I admit i haven't seen the latest version, but i would guess it's way back in the competition.

Using simpler tools for simple tasks is a good thing, but for those i'm actually hankering back to the days of Cool Edit Pro (!).

[64Guitars]

From: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/wiki/Roadmap

Audacity is currently undergoing a massive code restructuring. As such, it is difficult to make any predictions and concrete plans beyond the near-term future.

That said, these are the main features we want to add to upcoming releases:

3.2
The preliminary list of changes can be found in the release notes: https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Release_Notes_3.2

3.3
Smart Clips 2.0

• Multi-selection of clips
• Grouping of clips
• Overlapping clips
• Additional clips improvements

3.x
Any further 3.x releases will be very light in terms of features, with the team focusing on code restructuring and replatforming instead. The number of 3.x releases depends on how much work this restructuring and replatforming takes.

4.0

• Replatform from wxWidgets to Qt done, giving Audacity (finally!) a new look and alleviating many UI/UX problems
• Code restructuring mostly done

4.x
Starting with 4.0, we will try to implement some DAW functionality (eg proper MIDI support, Automation, VSTi) into Audacity while still remaining easy-to-use.

[Ted]

From: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/wiki/Roadmap

That's good stuff; more than just the "working around the edges" stuff I've been observing for years. I'll check out the post.

[Ted]

This made me laugh:

...while still remaining easy-to-use.

Audacity is one of the least intuitive pieces of software I regularly use (GIMP being the other one). I hope they are working with some good UX/UI people.