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Tuesday, March 27, 20071175046192
Audacity violates the Unix Philosophy
Why is it that, considering that command line interfaces is a core of the Unix Philosophy...
(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.
Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other programs.
Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.
... the case that Audacity, the best free software audio recorded and editor on the planet, has no command line interface?
Shame! Shame!
I'll be able to get around this by using lame.exe or somesuch, but it doesn't make sense that I have to manually export the fourty sound files I recorded with audacity, all to use a non-audacity program to edit them.
20:43 Posted by Dan tdaxp (Webmaster) in Software | Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this | Tags: audacity, lame, unix philosophy, cli, command line
Comments
I think that the answer to your question revolves around the Complexity classes Polynomial Time and Nondeterministic Polynomial Time (P versus NP).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_classes_P_and_NP
Posted by: Taylor | Wednesday, March 28, 2007
How so? I'm familiar with those concepts from back in my CompSci Masters days, but I don't see how they fit in.
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | Wednesday, March 28, 2007
I think the simpler explanation is that the average sound designer wouldn't use it. They're all secretly wishing they were on Macs.
Posted by: Steve French | Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Steve,
Doubtlessly true.
Sadly, lame does not have a pre-compiled version available, and I couldn't find another one that did what I wanted. So I eventually bit the bullet and manually edited the forty or so files in audacity (took about 15 minutes).
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | Thursday, March 29, 2007