[LAU] Re: FLOSS Audio editors on Linux: are they all dead(-ish)?

On 15/07/2025 10:25, Will Godfrey wrote:
> On Thu, 29 May 2025 20:31:06 +1000
> Roger <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On 29/5/25 20:02, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
>>> Hi LAU and LAD,
>>>
>>> It seems that (FLOSS) audio editors (not DAWs) are all either
>>> dead/obsolate (mhwaveditor, rezound), in strange development states
>>> (Audacity, Tenacity).

[...]
>>
>> I use Audacity regularly and it works fine, version 3.7 is quite good.
>>
>> Keenly awaiting v.4 as all older versions had UI issues on hi-res
>> screens and the v.4 UI looks promising. I tried the pre-alpha but it was
>> basically not working.
>>
>> Tenacity is a long way behind in development and its main premise for
>> existence, ie. telemetry, was dropped from Audacity in Linux at least.

I do have quite a lot of (LV2) plugins and being on Manjaro (Arch based) 
I noticed I am in a strange situation where I have indeed duplicates of 
plugins in both /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 - but this is another story

which is weird because apart from maybe Yoshimi I either install plugins 
from repositories or AUR and if I download any binary ones put them in 
~/.lv2

The issue with Audacity is that it takes ages to search for plugins 
(VSTs, LV2, whatnot), and even cancelling won't help. Disabling all 
plugins also doesn't seem to help. And I can't seem to find ways to 
disable non-audaicity plugins, so Audacity insists in scanning plugins 
at start-up no matter what.

In Tenacity there is an option to disable non-native plugins but it 
seems to be ignored because it complains  at least about LV2 duplicates, 
plus there doesn't seem a way to specify explicitly which directories to 
search plugins for.

In comparison Ardour or Carla load blazingly fast even with the many 
plugins I have installed. Ardour finds newly installed plugins on 
startup really fast, and in both even doing a full re-scanning for 
specific plugin-types does take a while but is relatively fast.

The paradox is that ideally I don't really need external plugins (LV2, 
VST) in this kind of editor as I find the 'native' ones suffice for this 
kind of audio editing. I even tried compiling tenacity without any 
plugin support but it was rocket science and while I managed it in the 
end (and it took really really long and lots of CPU power), resulting in 
decent start-up time it's not a very maintainable solution.

On the other hand mhwaveedit, GTK2 more ore less abandoned software - 
alas, loads large stereo wave files quite fast, has all basic editing 
features and a practical recording interface which works well when 
recording via jack which it supports natively; it also sort of works 
with pipewire (albeit with some lag in play/stop). It actually even has 
LADSPA support which I seldom use as the interface is really hardly 
usable with more complex plugins.

Actually, I admit to having started recently to use a couple of Ardour 
sessions set-up for 'audio editing' where I just dump files I want to 
edit, edit them and then quick export via the start/end markers. This is 
still not as fast as an editor and in the long-run the session gets 
quite messy (if not cleaned up), but it is also a creative work-around 
option and you get the mighty power of Ardour like busses, effects etc. :-)

Maybe (ab)using Ardour like this could be streamlined (hacked) via 
scripting, ardour session manipulation (which is XML), but not sure it's 
worth the effort :-D

Lorenzo
PS: for both Tenacity (via bug report) and Audacity (via their 'forum') 
I did report these issues.
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list -- linux-audio-user-cunTk1MwBs/[email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to linux-audio-user-leave-cunTk1MwBs/[email protected]