Audacity 4.0

Use freeform text; it's a standard part of musical notation. Just because most of what you see on a score is some form or another of shorthand doesn't mean everything is.

How do you think Tom Lehrer was able to indicate a tempo of "Pornissimo"?

https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/smut-m...

The only real problem is guitar always has several different ways to play the same notes all over the neck and instrument tuning isn't always specified either.

Standard tuning may not work and tabs sometimes aren't there alongside the staff. If you're trying to sight read, you'll guess alright for a while until you are suddenly forced to make heroic leaps to the other end of the neck or painfully contort your fingers just so you don't miss a beat.

probably a standalone Italian word would be fine, or some special < like we have for gradually increasing volume

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard

The majority of music uses a system of intervals called the major scale, which is seven notes with a particular spacing that is determined largely by psychoacoustics (that is, we didn’t just make it up). That spacing can be shifted around to any point on the underlying 12-note system, which gives different keys/modes. On any single piece of music you’re typically using only one of those, so those seven notes are the “skeleton” underlying it all. This is what it means to say “this piece is in D major”. (BTW, a fifth is the fifth note in the major scale, so yes, there is a 5!)

Standard notation privileges these modes of the major scale, which means (assuming you know how to play all the major scales on your instrument) there’s a 1:1 mapping from places on the staff to scale degrees. That means most of the time you’re reading straight off the score into the scale your fingers have memorized.

The key signature is what makes this work. You can even instantly transpose by ignoring the written key signature and reading in another key. Chords are also made readable because they’re usually based on thirds, which happens to be the interval that makes the notes stack up exactly next to each other, so a triad, seventh chord, etc. is instantly recognizable.

So basically the notation is optimized for the common case (the music is using notes from a mode of the major scale) and makes exceptions (accidentals) stand out.

And yes, pianos are a pain because all the (musical) keys are different on the (physical) keys. However, pianos are great because all the octaves look exactly alike (so finding all the Ds on the keyboard is trivial). Stringed instruments like guitars or violins are the opposite: all the (musical) key fingerings are the same, but you have to memorize the positions of all the notes because they all look the same. Pick your poison.

The answer to why people don't use a chromatic scale is also in there. Very roughy, it's harder to sight read intervals between notes.

Standard music notation is a like a London Underground map, it's symbolic rather than literal.

Being more symbolic gives standard notation many advantages once you learn it.

The video does a much better job of explaining that than I've given. It really is very good.

The problem with linnstrument and similar things is exactly equality of any note, it's not easy to think like "ok, here we move to another key, so we have to add one sharp here" on a controller like that. For me, even on a guitar I have to "see" the notes to play well and understand what I'm playing, so I had to learn "white keys" on the fretboard, and on top of that, learn octave numbers for each note, only then it really works for me and it's still hard compared to the keyboard where you see all sharps and flats and can treat them as you like. That's more important than using the same muscle memory imo

*7 note system

It's called an "octave" because the 8th note is considered another instance of the 1st.

I learned to read sheet music as a kid by my mom taking me to piano lessons. I cannot play the piano but I know where the notes are that correspond to the sheet music. I parlayed that into learning to play woodwinds when I got older. Even that was just enough to have fun. Nothing about it was me being serious about being a musician. So when other students would talk about 5ths and 3rds, I was totally lost. Then someone just said transpose the note up/down 5 notes (or 3 or whatever). They said it confidently, and they were first chair, so I went with it. I've never needed to know it, as I just play the notes as written on the sheet. I've never gigged where I had to play different keys.

But yeah, the fifth nomenclature confused the hell out of me too

The transition from absolute to relative pitch is like moving from basic arithmetic to algebra, once it clicks. Except that relative pitch is way easier to understand without notation, pick a reference and go from there.

Fifth (ordinal), not fifth (fraction).

That's why a whole tone is called a "second", not a "half".

> This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!

It's clearly intended to be a joke, no one would honestly think they've "solved" a 1000 year discussion with no objective answer.

As a public, well-known example, Dell being taken private in 2013 seemed to work out.

e.g. simply keeping the company afloat via PE cash.

If I recall correctly, this is what happened to Hilton Hotels. They were collapsing during the housing crisis.

A slightly different scenario but Hertz is a PE success story. It was owned by Ford and bought by a private equity firm. Now it's a standalone company making mint.

Most enshittification I am familiar with is because I read it in the news, therefore if non-shittification does happen it is likely I do not hear about it. I suppose the same holds true for other people.

If you were correct and people just had to hear about it then people wouldn't go around worrying about violent crime, because of always seeing on the news, despite it having fallen to historic lows. Instead people should be just walking around talking about how safe and non-violent the streets are nowadays.

So, if you're going to have to rewrite your back-end to disentangle it from your UI layer anyway why not also bring it up to speed?

This was already a widely adopted piece of software. It was my go-to for light audio work like trimming a sample, for being free and easy to use for exactly that.

I seem to remember at the time the plan was to pull all changes from Audacity across but not the team/company behind it.

As far as I can tell they're updating the much dated UX from being stuck in the 90's and are making great strides on the app.

I'm fine with them making money as they're investing into a utility I use.

The Audacity team imported their existing Qt interface code from a previous project. Depending on the design, the code smell could have a lot of vestigial parts unrelated to the new project.

I have always seen FOSS as the last stop for public domain software. It is supposed to become the stable road future kids walk down to become professionals. The Qt framework is often antithetical to that goal in my opinion. =3

Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility.

It looks like a well crafted UI, with care and attention to detail. The kind of thing that takes coordination. Scrum can help with that.

The grandparent poster seemed to be claiming the opposite: that scrum makes such things harder to achieve. That doesn’t match my experience. I think you can make a polished product, or a mess, using any of a variety of coordination technuqies. If anything, the planning technique is orthogonal to the cohesion of the product (although IMO if you do Scrum well, you’ll probably find it easier to coordinate towards a high cohesion product). But Scrum (or any well run system) is not the only factor. At a minimum you need a team who want a high cohesion product; you need some people who can help steer production towards a high-cohesion product; you need to have people on the team willing to have their opinions challenged from time to time; and, if you’ll indulge a little axe-grinding, you need the younger team members to trust the more experienced ones.