Development Projects

How Plans Progress

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

• Most of the time the most important activity is being tracked on Next Release. That page has information about progress and schedule on the current release. You can see commits that are progressing the release on our GitHub master branch. Many of the commits will have titles, complete with bug numbers, from Bugzilla that the commit is intended to address.

Design

• Feature Requests give us some numerical indication of features that users would like. However, all developers are volunteers, and what they decide to do is only to an extent influenced by the requests.
• We thrash out details of proposed new features on proposal pages. Often there are experiments in github branches, and screenshots from those are shared on these pages.
• We have many pages about onward development plans.

Automation Project

James Crook ran a project in 2018 to bring more automation into work on Audacity.

Important development features included:

• A graphic index, WIT, to audacity, to link deeper into the manual.

WIT also:

• Has features to index into doxygen documentation
• To automate production of annotated images for the manual
• To automate provision of tables used in the manual.

• mod-script-pipe a module that lets Audacity be driven by an external script, is being got ready for release.
  • Work on making mod-script-pipe more functional is also making Chains more functional too.
• The automation project is also producing:
  • Improvements to Nyquist
  • A test script that gives Audacity a workout, by generating over 90% of the images in the manual.
  • Scripts based on pywikibot for automating work on our wikis.
  • A Python script (using BeautifulSoup) to create an Pdf version of the manual with image-mapped images from the wiki.

The Automation project page tracked all this work on automation.

• Separately in automation, Buanzo worked on Automated Windows builds for Audacity. This has now been superseded by AppVeyor builds.

Two Experimental Feeder Branches

These provide new code that is user-ready and intended for merging into Audacity. These branches may be ready and distributed for use a year or more before their appearance in Audacity.

• DarkAudacity by James Crook, an ongoing feeder-project into Audacity the brings in GUI innovations. DarkAudacity was started in June 2016, and released that August. It delivered significant changes to Audacity 2.2.0 a year later, and the project is continuing on in 2018.
  • The progress on integration page tracks details of transfer of work on DarkAudacity into Audacity.
  • The changes to the theming feature tracks progress on meeting team requests for theme changes.
  • The 2016 release of DarkAudacity is fully merged into Audacity. Next DarkAudacity release arrived in the first half of 2018.

Also another feeder-project:

• To Be Confirmed.
  • A curated branch, curated by Paul Licameli, that contains a mix of Work In Progress for feedback and early adopters.

Google Summer of Code

Audacity has participated twice in Google Summer of Code. Once in 2008 and once in 2009.

Miscellaneous

Various odd bits about development projects that don't fit anywhere else.

• The Audacity code has work-in-progress on Experimental Features and Experimental Modules.
  • Often these projects are stalled or inactive.
  • Some just need someone to pick up the code and bring it back to life.
• We have a Roadmap, but the roadmap is rather old. In practice what gets developed is what developers have energy for and interest in.

Summary of Active Projects

Type	Code?	Feature	Tracker	Who	Review	Comments
Release	C++	Audacity 2.3.3	Schedule / Bugs	James	Team	In string freeze. Translation started.
Release	C++	Audacity 2.2.2	Released	Paul	Team
Release	C++	Audacity 2.2.1	Released	Paul	Team
Automation	C++	Scripting	Usable / ToDo	James	Steve
Automation	Javascript	WIT	Released / ToDo	James	Peter	"What is That?" website is live.
Automation	C++	Nyquist upgrade	Changes are checked in and scheduled for 2.3.0 release	James	Steve
Automation	Python / LaTeX	Pdf of manual	Released / ToDo / Tweaks	James		2.2.0 manual available for download in pdf format.
Automation	Python	Image Script	Usable / ToDo	James		C++ version used in updating 2.2.0 manual. Webby version nearly there.
Automation	Python	PyWikibot	ToDo	James		A how-to project rather than a coding project.
	C++	MIDI	More to do	Pokechu22	Paul	Live in 2.2.0
	C++	Timer Record		Mark	Steve	Live in 2.2.0
Website	HTML / CSS	Theme Update	ToDo	Shinta	Steve	Live for 2.2.2
	C++	Translation Support	More to do	Paul		PLURAL() macro in use. XO and Nyquist translated.
Feeder Branch	C++			Paul		Code refactorings using modern idioms.
Feeder Branch	C++	DarkAudacity integration	Integrated / ToDo / Tweaks	James		Cycle 1 live in 2.2.0 Cycle 2 started.
Spike solution	C++	AU14 TrackPanel	Proof-of-concept	James		Proof-of-Concept works recording / playback / zooming.
	C++	Fish-Eye	In a branch	Paul