Developer Guide
Contents
Tips for New Developers
- Ask lots of questions and don't be afraid to look a divvy! It's a learning process and like I tell my students, 'if you don't understand (after a reasonable amount of effort), ask somebody who can help!'.
- Use the same tools other people are using.
- Post error messages when asking for help, but try and select relevant bits.
Platform Specific Guides
Getting Audacity building on Linux is usually trouble-free because the right tools are there in the environment, or can be found and installed easily. The same isn't really true for Windows and the win/compile.txt file provided with the Audacity source code assumes you know quite a lot about how stuff works under the bonnet, and about Visual Studio.
- Developing On Windows
- Developing On Linux and Compiling Audacity Step by Step Guide
- Developing On Mac
Design Topics
Improving and Adding Features
Adding new features is one of the more exciting aspects of the job, but needs care so as not to destabilise what is already there. New approaches using a plug-in type of architecture can help this. Even so, there are some things that cannot always be done in an open source program due to licensing restrictions. Have a look at our Feature Requests page to see what our users most wish to see in Audacity, add your own requests, and let us know if you are interested in helping us implement the best of these.
More about Digital Sound
There are articles on the web ranging from beginners' guides on how sound is represented in a computer to research papers on DSP algorithms.
