[Audacity-users] Audacity vs. Ceres Sound Studio - first impressions

[Fernando Cassia]

Hi,

I´m new to audacity, and the main reason I ended up discovering it is because:

A. I needed a decent audio editor for my linux systems, that I could also share on the windows one.
B. After moving my desktop windows system from Win2k to WinXP SP2, my previous favourite audio editor (Ceres Sound Studio, shareware from ~1997 for Windows 95, from a German company that apparently disappeared from the face of Earth) stopped working. It must be something related to DirectX, or the sound drivers, or multimedia APIs that changed over time from Win95 to the current windows incantation. Or maybe a timing issue in the audio routines (Ceres was designed for w95, and still runs very well to this day on my ancient thinkpad notebook with a Pentium 1 MMX CPUs and Windows 98SE).

Here's some first impressions about the program:

1. The default color scheme is REALLY, really ugly for my tastes. What's wrong with the "BLACK background, waveform in green" classic?. That's the standard in Ceres and GoldWave, and the black background doesn't make my eyes hurt as the gray/blue one. I tried switching color schemes, and couldn't find any that matches this. I know default colors are a matter of personal preference, yet I wonder if there was any discussion/reason for making Audacity's default color scheme the current one.

2. Memory Usage/design leaves a lot to be desired... I'll explain: one of the beauties of CERES SOUND STUDIO was that the whole program was designed with performance in mind. As such, when you loaded a big file, what the program did was parse the whole file, to create the waveform on screen (always in "fit to screen size" mode, so you didn't have to scroll or change screens while playing back or moving around the file -of course your could zoom-in to a section, but the default was "fit to window" which was nice), but then any further cut-and-paste operations were DISK based, not MEMORY-BASED. In other words, say you highlighted a section going from position 00:01:35 to 00:02:20, and then hit the "delete" button. What it did was create a temp file going from 00:00:00 to 00:01:34:99, then another from 00:02:21 to [end of file] and then joined the two file segments into the resulting end waveform, updating the waveform visuals afterwards. As such, Ceres Sound Studio was DISK-INTENSIVE rather than MEMORY-intensive. I wonder if the programmers are following my reasoning. The beauty of this design was that it was possible for me to edit a 400MB waveform file in just a Pentium I  MMX  with 64mb of ram. As long as you had the patience to wait for all the disk i/o, it was a killer design.

Now compare this to audacity, which seems to be entirely MEMORY based ... I tried to load a 40-minute wave file and performance (on WinXP SP2 and a Athlon64cpu with 512mb ram) and the OS started swapping like h*ll....). Clearly for me, it looks as if Audacity attempts to load the ENTIRE wave file into memory, and does not use the disk-based approach of Ceres, which reduces its performance when dealing with huge files (unless you have a gigabyte of ram or more).

3. In Ceres (and GoldWave for that matter as far as I remember) the mouse cursor is only one. In Audacity it seems to me (I've only spent a couple hours with the product so I'm no expert and I beg for your patience and understanding if I'm wrong), that there's the moving cursor which indicates the playback position AND another moving-line which allows the user to set edit points. This is confusing. On Ceres Sound Studio, there is just a single cursor (blinking-line) that indicates the playback position AND also can be used as a "marker" to select waveform areas.

4. In Ceres I could just hit "play" and WHILE the sound is playing, click anywhere (back and forth) on the waveform AND the playback just "jumps" to that position continuing playback seamlessly (not even causing a click or pop), making finding the right position on the waveform VERY easy. In Audacity, You hit play, click somewhere in the waveform, and the playback continues unaffected.See my comment above about the "two cursors/position indicators" (one that moves along while the file is playing, the other that stays at the position where the user clicked. Imho, to make things easier there should be a single cursor/position indicator.

5. Another great feature that I miss from Ceres.... the use of the cursor up/down keys to make the cursor jump several seconds back/forward in the waveform. That complemented the use of the left-right cursor keys nicely, because you could "move slowly" with left/right, and "jump" with up/down.

6. The mouse pointer changing to the "finger" is really annoying and distracting. There should be a preference, imho, to disable this.

7. There should be a way to make "fit in window", and "fit vertically" the default behaviour.

These are my main complaints / annoyances I find with the product.

I'd like to hear back from other users, if they have used Ceres Sound Studio, GoldWave etc and what you think about my comments. And for developers, please take my comments as constructive criticism. Perhaps some of the killer features I saw in Ceres could be considered for future addition into Audacity?

No, I'm not asking you to turn Audacity into Ceres -well, that would be nice ;-)-, I just think that there's room for improvement and to allow certain extra features like the ones I described as user-configurable settings.

Regards
Fernando Cassia

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 8/11/05, Fernando Cassia <fernando.cassia@...> wrote:

>  1. The default color scheme is REALLY, really ugly for my tastes. What's
> wrong with the "BLACK background, waveform in green" classic?. That's the
> standard in Ceres and GoldWave,

A standard back to 1997, not 2005, so sorry - not a good point here :)
Check out Samplitude and its color scheme and you'll see what I mean.

> personal preference, yet I wonder if there was any discussion/reason for
> making Audacity's default color scheme the current one.

I would rather vote for switchable color schemes like in Sweep (Linux
audio editor)

>  2. Memory Usage/design leaves a lot to be desired... I'll explain: one of
> the beauties of CERES SOUND STUDIO was that the whole program was designed
> with performance in mind. As such, when you loaded a big file, what the
> program did was parse the whole file, to create the waveform on screen
> (always in "fit to screen size" mode, so you didn't have to scroll or change
> screens while playing back or moving around the file -of course your could
> zoom-in to a section, but the default was "fit to window" which was nice),
> but then any further cut-and-paste operations were DISK based, not
> MEMORY-BASED. In other words, say you highlighted a section going from
> position 00:01:35 to 00:02:20, and then hit the "delete" button. What it did
> was create a temp file going from 00:00:00 to 00:01:34:99, then another from
> 00:02:21 to [end of file] and then joined the two file segments into the
> resulting end waveform, updating the waveform visuals afterwards. As such,
> Ceres Sound Studio was DISK-INTENSIVE rather than MEMORY-intensive. I wonder
> if the programmers are following my reasoning. The beauty of this design was
> that it was possible for me to edit a 400MB waveform file in just a Pentium
> I  MMX  with 64mb of ram. As long as you had the patience to wait for all
> the disk i/o, it was a killer design.

I think you definitely want to File - Preferences - File Formats and
have a look, whether "Read directly from original file" option is
selected.

>  Now compare this to audacity, which seems to be entirely MEMORY based ...

See above ;)

>  3. In Ceres (and GoldWave for that matter as far as I remember) the mouse
> cursor is only one. In Audacity it seems to me (I've only spent a couple
> hours with the product so I'm no expert and I beg for your patience and
> understanding if I'm wrong), that there's the moving cursor which indicates
> the playback position AND another moving-line which allows the user to set
> edit points. This is confusing. On Ceres Sound Studio, there is just a
> single cursor (blinking-line) that indicates the playback position AND also
> can be used as a "marker" to select waveform areas.

I personally find it very useful to have both and it doesn't look any
confusing. So sorry again :)

>  4. In Ceres I could just hit "play" and WHILE the sound is playing, click
> anywhere (back and forth) on the waveform AND the playback just "jumps" to
> that position continuing playback seamlessly (not even causing a click or
> pop), making finding the right position on the waveform VERY easy. In
> Audacity, You hit play, click somewhere in the waveform, and the playback
> continues unaffected.

Here I completely agree with you

>  5. Another great feature that I miss from Ceres.... the use of the cursor
> up/down keys to make the cursor jump several seconds back/forward in the
> waveform. That complemented the use of the left-right cursor keys nicely,
> because you could "move slowly" with left/right, and "jump" with up/down.

Yes, that would be nice as well

>  6. The mouse pointer changing to the "finger" is really annoying and
> distracting. There should be a preference, imho, to disable this.

Where did you see that???

>  7. There should be a way to make "fit in window", and "fit vertically" the
> default behaviour.

Could you please describe this behaviour better?

If I import a 2 minutes long track first then a 4 minutes long track,
should Audacity autoupdate the view for the longest one?

Alexandre


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[Markus Meyer]

Fernando Cassia schrieb:

> Now compare this to audacity, which seems to be entirely MEMORY based
> ... I tried to load a 40-minute wave file and performance (on WinXP
> SP2 and a Athlon64cpu with 512mb ram) and the OS started swapping like
> h*ll....). Clearly for me, it looks as if Audacity attempts to load
> the ENTIRE wave file into memory, and does not use the disk-based
> approach of Ceres, which reduces its performance when dealing with
> huge files (unless you have a gigabyte of ram or more).

Audacity uses a blockfile-oriented approach in that it organizes its own
disk cache. The delay you are seeing when you open the file is because
the file is analyzed (for faster wave form display) and the file is
copied (for safety). As Alexandre already mentioned, the latter one can
be switched off in preferences. I would be very surprised if Audacity
swaps when you open a file (have you verified this by looking at the
process manager?). It definitely does not load the whole file into
memory. Infact, we know of people who use Audacity to edit projects with
Audacity which are hundreds of Gigabytes big. Actually, this approach
often is regarded as one of Audacity's strengths. You can, for example,
copy/paste and cut audio from very big files without any delay at all.

It is, however, possible that Audacity uses more ressources than older
audio editors because of its overall design. For example, Audacity uses
a cross-platform library which allows it to run mostly unmodified (in
terms of source code) on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. This overhead
would not occur if it would be optimized 100% for, say, the Windows
operating system. For the same reasons, it only very rarely uses
processor-specific features (like MMX and SSE2, and assembly language in
general). Furthermore, modern software often uses more ressources than
older software, mostly "because it can". For example, everything I need
in a Word Processor is already in Microsoft Word for Windows 6.0, which
was a 16 bit program and needed at most a few mega bytes of disk space.
Yet, modern Microsoft Word 2003 needs gigs of disk space, although it
basically performs the same functions (for me, I mean). That's just the
way it is ;-)


Markus



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[l_d_allan]

>>  6. The mouse pointer changing to the "finger" is really annoying
and
>> distracting. There should be a preference, imho, to disable this.

> Where did you see that???

If you have a selected region, and then move the mouse cursor near one
of the selected edges, it becomes a finger.

>>  7. There should be a way to make "fit in window", and "fit
vertically" the
>> default behaviour.

> Could you please describe this behaviour better?

"Tracks Fit Vertically Zoomed" is now an options checkbox implemented
in the beta CVS code as a "Preference + Interface". I also got tired
of Ctrl+Shift+F. Ain't open source wonderful :-)




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[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 8/11/05, Lynn Allan <l_d_allan@...> wrote:
> >>  6. The mouse pointer changing to the "finger" is really annoying
> and
> >> distracting. There should be a preference, imho, to disable this.
>
> > Where did you see that???
>
> If you have a selected region, and then move the mouse cursor near one
> of the selected edges, it becomes a finger.

Hmmm, yes

Would "|<" and ">|" cursor look better to your opinion?

Alexandre


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[Richard Ash (audacity-help)]

Alexandre Prokoudine said:
> On 8/11/05, Lynn Allan <l_d_allan@...> wrote:
>> >>  6. The mouse pointer changing to the "finger" is really annoying
>> and
>> >> distracting. There should be a preference, imho, to disable this.
>> If you have a selected region, and then move the mouse cursor near one
>> of the selected edges, it becomes a finger.

You can always disable the "Enable dragging of left and right selection
edges" option on the Interface tab of the preferences - the cursor then
remains an I-beam and doesn't pick up the edges of the exisiting selection
to move them (it starts a new selection instead).

Richard Ash




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[Fernando Cassia]

On 8/11/05, Richard Ash <richard@...> wrote:

You can always disable the "Enable dragging of left and right selection
edges" option on the Interface tab of the preferences - the cursor then
remains an I-beam and doesn't pick up the edges of the exisiting selection
to move them (it starts a new selection instead).

Richard Ash

Thanks Richard, and everyone else who replied.
That's exactly what I was looking for...

Fernando

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[Anthony Airon Oetzmann]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:49:16 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

>On 8/11/05, Fernando Cassia <fernando.cassia@...> wrote:

>>  1. The default color scheme is REALLY, really ugly for my tastes. What's
>> wrong with the "BLACK background, waveform in green" classic?. That's the
>> standard in Ceres and GoldWave,

>A standard back to 1997, not 2005, so sorry - not a good point here :)
>Check out Samplitude and its color scheme and you'll see what I mean.

Standard colour shemes that do not tire the eyes over long periods of time
are important, and dark green on black background, while interesting for
some, is hardly used in editing and sequencing applications. I'd go nuts if
that colour sheme were used in Protools. Text, I presume, is displayed as
black text on a lightly coloured background for a reason too, and not as
light coloured text on a dark coloured background. It supposidly easier to
read for a longer period of time and thus a widley used standard.



>>  4. In Ceres I could just hit "play" and WHILE the sound is playing, click
>> anywhere (back and forth) on the waveform AND the playback just "jumps" to
>> that position continuing playback seamlessly (not even causing a click or
>> pop), making finding the right position on the waveform VERY easy. In
>> Audacity, You hit play, click somewhere in the waveform, and the playback
>> continues unaffected.

>Here I completely agree with you

This is obviously a preference of some users or for some situations.
I've never seen this being used in Protools, mainly because people like to
select stuff during playback. Protools has good scrubbing tools(single to
dual track srub and a scrub-trimmer), so I see no reason to click around in
the audio to find a certain spot. To me scrubbing is ten times faster than
clicking around to play the audio at that spot. In my line of work(lots of
editing decisions every day) limiting me to a click-to-play functionality
would slow me down.


>>  5. Another great feature that I miss from Ceres.... the use of the cursor
>> up/down keys to make the cursor jump several seconds back/forward in the
>> waveform. That complemented the use of the left-right cursor keys nicely,
>> because you could "move slowly" with left/right, and "jump" with up/down.

>Yes, that would be nice as well

Much better than using the mouse too.

 Tony



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[Anthony Airon Oetzmann]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 15:39:42 -0000 (GMT), Richard Ash wrote:

>Alexandre Prokoudine said:
>> On 8/11/05, Lynn Allan <l_d_allan@...> wrote:
>>> >>  6. The mouse pointer changing to the "finger" is really annoying
>>> and
>>> >> distracting. There should be a preference, imho, to disable this.
>>> If you have a selected region, and then move the mouse cursor near one
>>> of the selected edges, it becomes a finger.
>
>You can always disable the "Enable dragging of left and right selection
>edges" option on the Interface tab of the preferences - the cursor then
>remains an I-beam and doesn't pick up the edges of the exisiting selection
>to move them (it starts a new selection instead).

That's what I'd use btw. You can always change the left or right selection
boundaries by holding SHIFT+click in the vicinity of the those boundaries.

A change in cursor appearance will make more sense for changing the
boundaries of actual clips, if such a functionality becomes available that
is.

 Tony



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