Roadmap

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Users who want to request new features for Audacity are very welcome to do so on our Feature Requests page. We also have several other pages where you can learn more about feature requests and planning.

How Features Get Planned

• See "The Feature Requests Pipeline"

Overview

Experience shows that a normal roadmap with dates and planned sequence of version numbers and what they will contain is completely out of the question for Audacity. We don't have a single person running the show. In any case the classic choice:

 "Scope, Schedule, Quality - Pick Two" 

applies to Audacity. Roadmaps that attempt to control all three are not realistic. Our current choices are to release often to a fixed date chosen in advance (Schedule). We also choose to focus on removing bugs (Quality).

You could argue that there isn't any roadmap for Audacity. Instead different team members may or may not argue here for their views as to how development should happen going forward.

The Release Schedule

• We released Audacity 1.3.10 Beta on 1st December 2009.
• We released Audacity 1.3.11 Beta on 18th January 2010.
• We will do a release on 1st March 2010. It will be 1.3.12.
• 1.3.13 released 6Apr11
• 1.3.14 released 8Dec11
• 2.0.0 scheduled for release 29Feb12

Roadmap according to James

These are James Crook's views...

Stable Releases

• Fully agree with the initiative from Martyn to release often. We've had a huge gap between CVS head and our stable line, and we do not want that to happen again. Stable releases should simply become CVS head with experimental new features switched off. My view is that once we have 2.0 we should be able to release stable every 3 months, cutting features that are just not ready.
• Big new features should be in plug-ins. That makes it so much easier to keep Audacity stable. Cleanspeech, Karaoke and Timer record should become Audacity plug-ins.

Features

• Option of context help in the preferences dialogs taken directly from the manual.
• Improvements to scrolling and zooming behaviour for close up work. Our code is fast enough to do an oscilloscope style display on P700+, but for that to work well some changes are needed in how we select audio and how we choose to scroll.
• I'd like to see discontinuous selections implemented. This would be a lot cleaner than 'labelled region' operations. It would also drive the code structure that fixes whitespace versus silence issues.
• Re-organisation of menus. These (in my opinion) have grown to be large and confusing. They are partly to blame for the save-export confusion in many users. Making the options under the menu items more powerful reduces the number of menu items we need. Discussion at Proposal Menu Reorganisation and related sub pages.
• Fix multi-tool mode so that it can drag clips. This got broken by the introduction of multi-clips making multi-tool mode much less useful.
• Enhancement to screenshot tool so as to screen-capture modal dialogs and menus for the manual.
• The over-due TrackPanel refactor. We need to make it easy for plug-ins to plug-in new track types.

Increasing Satisfaction in Participation

• Listen for and invite feedback from new contributors. For example the need for better internal documentation in the code was highlighted by both 2009 GSoC students.
• Get across to new contributors that this is a do-ocracy. In general the person who does the work on something decides how it should be.
• Help people increase their own productivity. Spot cases of people pulling in opposite directions early. Turn queries into FAQs. Turn e-mails into documentation. Turn tests into features. Turn closed bugs into development policies.

Infrastructure

We need to look at these... What we do is up for discussion...

• Bug tracking - (mostly done) Bugs are now in Bugzilla, with search page at Bug Lists
• Translation infrastructure.
• Should we close down feedback@audacity.org and make people use the forum?
  • Peter 16Feb12: +1 to this
  • Gale 17Feb12: -1 (as it's my decision it has to stay open). There are many reasons against closing it, and not many reasons for. You can contact me privately or talk about it in the Forum if you want.

Roadmap according Peter Sampson 27Mar12

Now that we have released 2.0.0 I would like to put this stake in the ground for a few Propsals and Feature Requests that I would dearly love to see implemented as they would greatly improve the usability and/or usefulness of Audacity to our users.

Existing Proposals

1. Proposal Timer Record Improvements - greatly enhanced functionality, increases usefulness
2. Proposal Improvement of Meter Toolbar UI - improved user experience - more controllabilty of input signal
3. Proposal DC Offset removal and not Proposal DC Management - usabilty, encourages proper processing order
4. Proposal Easy cfg Reset - frequently needed in Forum advice to users

Existing "Feature Requests"

1. Scrubbing (53 votes)
2. Effects Categorization (31 votes) - now that Proposal Binding Effects to Hot-Keys is implemented

Existing "Pending Feature Requests"

1. Export WAV without metadata
2. Pause notification: all items in Effect, Generate and Analyze menus are greyed out when in Pause, it would be a good idea to pop-up a warning if any of these three menu items is clicked when in Pause. This would make the problem easily discoverable.