[arbitrage]

Beloved is a little too strong of word choice for me.

The UI is garbage. The plugin architecture is rough. It's difficult to workflow -- no automation is really available. Audacity produces good results, at the cost of an insanely high requirement for patience and experience. What you are actually in love with is the creative process of editing and creating audio.

As a project, audacity has languished for a long time. It has the potential to be great -- but it's not there, now.

[javchz]

The great about Audacity it's that it's a great DAW starter. You can record, edit, multitrack, mix and apply effects.

It's fast, out of the box, multiplatform... and I haven't used it in years, but that's mostly because Reaper it's too great, the only thing I miss it's audacity loading times.

Now I think Audacity has only a few bottlenecks, the main workflow it's not that broken.

If what they say it's accomplished and they prioritize VTS non-destructive effects, improve the Timeline management and other UX details. I could see Audacity present in the majority of home studios and the software behind a lot of professional works (not big studios, but enough for self publish). I now a couple of local bands that recorded their demo with audacity, a cheap interface and a sm57 mic.

...and if I can ask maybe add support for ASIO (something hard to happen becauses licences, but I can dream).

[spacemanmatt]

Much agreed on the history of Audacity. It has so much capability, but it's high time we fixed UIs that inspire anger or still depend on Athena widgets.

[formerly_proven]

Audacity uses wxWidgets (though almost everything of the primary UI is custom painted, so it doesn't really matter which toolkit is used).

[offtop5]

Obviously it does what it does well. It can edit audio quickly. I'll never use it for anything else aside from chopping up samples. If you want a full DAW use Logic.