Proposal Low Hanging Fruit

Proposal pages help us get from feature requests into actual plans. This is an umbrella proposal gathering together several existing proposals which if tackled could produce huge benefits for our users.

Proposal pages are used on an ongoing basis by the Audacity development team and are open to edits from visitors to the wiki. They are a good way to get community feedback on a proposal.

• Note: Proposals for Google Summer of Code projects are significantly different in structure, are submitted via Google's web app and may or may not have a corresponding proposal page.

• James wrote: "We need a page on the wiki "Low Hanging Fruit", in which we list some proposals that are believed to be big-bang-for-bucks."

Items added to this page should have developer backing, because otherwise there is not a developer who agrees that it is 'low hanging fruit'. Also the substantive part of each proposal should have a design that is not controversial. Otherwise the 'small effort' becomes a 'large effort' in gaining consensus from team.

Proposals

• Proposal Play at Speed - real time play at speed, and with a resizable slider.
  • Play-at-Speed for Loop Play
  • Play-at-Speed for Play Cut Preview
  • remove Play-at-Speed button

Work by Paul on seeking and scrubbing means we have a reliable system for vari-speed play, and it 'just' needs to be connected to this control. Note that the old play-at-speed leaked memory badly, because it allocated a time track for each change in speed.

• Proposal new Zoom Toolbar - separate off the zoom controls from the Edit Toolbar - and increase zoom functionality
  • Separation is just following existing code idiom. Work is mostly in agreeing on what zoom options to provide and producing suitable icons.
• Proposal Zoom Context - 3 related features. Zooming in or out to be more clearly connected to the 'region of interest', e.g. current selection.
  • There are three points to this proposal, and implementing the first two is the part that has high return for low investment.
• Proposal Effect Menu Categorization - categorize the effect menu into sub-menus
  • The least work way offers a text file to edit.
• Proposal Log / Linear Envelope Option - a proposal to improve the Envelope Tool.
  • This is an alternative path in calculation of envelope interpolation. Drawing code will become a little more complex too as it is no longer drawing straight lines.
• Proposal: Waveform and clip colors - a proposal to assign different colors to individual tracks, clips or regions
  • Clip colors

High Return on Investment

Not quite low hanging fruit, but very good value for the work that would be expended. Typically these will be features which by themselves merit a 2.2.0 -> 2.3.0 version bump.

• Proposal Unitary Project - provide a single "container" for Audacity Projects rather than the AUP file and data being separate
  • This one is potentially a lot of work, but the benefit in reduced support of keeping all audio in one file is HUGE.
  • This is now delivered in 3.0.0