[teilo]

Audacity, despite its weaknesses compared to commercial tools, still excels at batch processing due to its Nyquist plugin suite. The macro tool is finicky, but you can still do things that nothing else can in a batch, like trimming leading and trailing silence and then adding an exact amount of silence to the front and end of a file. You would think functions so simple and obvious as this would already exist in Audition, RX, SpectraLayers, etc., but no.

[atoav]

Ffmpeg or sox can do the silence trimming for you on the command line. And it is totally reasonable to just have a script lying around that does that.

[kzrdude]

Audacity is also commercial, even if it's free and open source. That's because Muse is developing it and has a commercial interest in it, and their goals now (partly) govern the project.

For example, that also makes them vulnerable to "enshittification".

[LWinterberg]

Not really. Enshittification requires high switching costs, so users stick around despite thinking "yeah I should go somewhere else". With Audacity, switching costs are low. You either can compile the thing with the relevant features disabled, or you can just download an older version of the software and stick with that to the end of time if you dislike the changes a new version brings.

Even to the suitiest of corporate suits it's clear that the enshittification funnel (first it's awesome for users, then for partners like publishers and advertisers at the cost of users, then it's awesome for making money at the cost of everyone else) simply doesn't work with an open source program.

[kzrdude]

That is a good point, but I'm not that optimistic. Maybe it dampens the effect, but for me with Musescore 4 I already think some things went in that direction.

VS Code is also not immune (I use codium, but only as a secondary editor to Neovim).

[intalentive]

I take care of that stuff in Python, it’s pretty straightforward.

[jacquesm]

Sox?

[defrost]

Total OG oldschool swiss army knife for audio processing | playing .. that takes me back.

In the 1990s in a long workroom of sun workstations we rigged a rlogin sox script to play succesive parts of some spooky music as a co worker walked past each one late one night.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/

https://github.com/chirlu/sox