For Developers

Give us feedback	Develop	Translate	Support other Users

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Code we Like!

Audacity aims to be a simple to use but powerful audio editor. We're open to exciting new features, bugfixes (yes please!) and new ideas, and at the same time, we need to do things a certain way.

• We want to avoid making Audacity over complex. The majority of our users are newish to audio editing. The simple things ought to be easy to do for them. The more advanced things can be there, but should not 'get in the way'. Many of our users do not read the manual. Follow our design guidelines to make the user interface consistent and more discoverable.
• We don't know that you will stay around after you have contributed code, so new code should follow our coding standards so that it is more maintainable by us.
• To get the best from contributing to open source, you should become aware of the community beyond the developers who support users, get feedback, test and document Audacity. The experience they have can often help what you write be better, and save you time too.

This is how we get from ideas to new releases of Audacity Feature Requests   -->   Proposals   -->   Projects   -->   Releases

Guides and Connecting Check out the developer guide and subscribe to the audacity-devel mailing list Why subscribe? We have found time and again that good programmers are overly reluctant to ask for actual help. It is usually our fault, not yours, if you can't compile. Our instructions and guides are not always good and up to date. Especially if you have difficulty compiling Audacity, reach out to one of us on the mailing list, and talk us through how far you get. Together we can work to fix it, and to fix the compiling instructions, so that other people have an easier time in future.

Topics for Developers

Building

• Our code on GitHub
• Building On Windows
• Building On Linux
• Building On Mac
• CMake Options
• Building On Cygwin (Deprecated/Not Maintained)
• Building The Manual

Developer Documentation

• Guide for New Audacity Developers
  • Nyquist plug-ins HowTo
  • Scripting
• Standards and Conventions
  • Coding Standards
  • Code Review
• The Feature Requests Pipeline
  • Proposals
  • Feature Requests
• Audacity Architecture
• Xgettext & Translation
• Doxygen & Smart Comments
  • Doxygenated class list

Development Activity

• Next Release that we are working on
  • Wording changes required in the app
• Active Development Projects
  • Macros discussion page

Quality Assurance

• Bear Traps
• Bug Lists
  • Plug-ins that crash or fail in Audacity
• Design Topics
• Wording and punctuation guidelines
  • Capitalization Guidelines

...Everything for Developers

Ideas? Want to Contact Us?

Didn't find what you were looking for? Here are various ways to contact us.