Tenacity

Writing audio software is a difficult and thankless task. Not only is the signal-processing code a challenge to program, and the Linux audio stack difficult to interact with, creating a user interface to help users ignore this complexity is almost impossible. It's why the applications that find a successful approach change very little over time. Modern Cubase still has a lot in common with 1989 Cubase, Ableton hasn't changed since its release in 2001, and on Linux, Ardour remains as austere as it did in 2005, albeit with a host of modern features and incredibly powerful levels of control. But it's Audacity that's perhaps changed the least while remaining one of the most popular audio editors on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Audacity is used by everyone, from ordinary desktop users converting FLACs to MP3s, through amateur musicians mastering their audio for distribution on Bandcamp, to professional podcasters. It remains a rock-solid application that can record and edit glitch-free for hours.

Tenacity is a fork of Audacity that's already overhauled its aesthetic and hopes to take things further with community involvement.

Despite this commitment to consistency, Audacity development has been considered too slow by many, especially when the project added, and reneged, on adding opt-out telemetry after it was taken over by the Muse Group (the same organization behind the brilliant MuseScore). This led to two separate forks of the project, both committed to bringing Audacity into the modern age without any telemetry, and under the auspices of their respective open source communities. Initiatives such as these are difficult to pull off and rarely succeed in supplanting an original, but both projects have survived and have recently merged under the name of the most successful, Tenacity.

Tenacity promises to be a fresh, modern, more convenient, and more practical audio editor than Audacity. The latest release is a great showcase of what progress has already been made. The main differences can be seen in the user interface, which has been rethemed. Icons, text rendering, and theme colors all look vastly improved and are vastly superior to the originals on a dark-themed desktop. This was a feature that Audacity seemed reluctant to add, and its own dark mode can be hit-and-miss when it comes to integrating with the VU meters, for example, or the waveform rendering. It helps to make Tenacity more pleasurable to use, while also helping it feel more modern. It's also built without Audacity's telemetry, requiring neither the build flag to be set nor the runtime setting to be unset, ensuring your data isn't going anywhere. Everything else is the best of what Audacity included when the fork occurred at version 3.0.2. This means you get decades of developer and user experience and a rock-solid audio editor. Audacity is still a great project, of course, and has itself improved significantly by finally adding real-time effects processing, albeit at an early stage, and it will be interesting to see whether Tenacity can merge these additions into its own code, now significantly diverged from Audacity's, or whether the team will be able to maintain enough momentum to create a truly independent project with its own unique approach to audio editing. There's no doubt that there's huge demand for an open source audio editor like this, and there's potentially significant rewards for the project that succeeds.

Project Website

https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity

Competition is a good thing, and hopefully Tenacity can keep up with recent Audacity developments to include real-time audio effects.

Survival roguelike

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

This is a complicated adventure game with a steep learning curve. It runs from the command line, and when you create a character and drop into the game world, everything initially looks a lot like the original NetHack. It's built using text characters with ncurses, with a central character for your avatar, a "fog of war" that lifts according to your line of sight as you explore, and a selection of stats and attributes on the right. Like NetHack, the ASCII text can be replaced with graphical tiles which can make the game feel a lot more modern but will also pull the gameplay out of the terminal and onto your desktop. Either way, both versions of the game play identically, and they're both equally difficult.

Cataclysm describes itself as a "turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world," and this is the world you need to explore from the outset while attending to your attributes to keep you alive. Turn-based means there's a move cost in every action you perform, and starting difficulty is dependent on which starting scenario you choose, with "Evacuee" giving you enough resources to help initially. This also depends on which character profession you choose, because different professions come equipped with different default inventories. There are many professions to choose between, from Ballroom Dancer to Punk Rock Dude, and everything seems to affect everything else. It takes many hours to begin to understand the effects of the choices you make both before the game starts, and within the gaming environment itself, but some excellent onboarding guides and online videos can really help. The end result is a roguelike with elements of NetHack, a scenario like Fallout, and an emphasis on survival and combat. Like NetHack, it rewards the time you invest in learning it with a deep gaming experience, albeit with a much harder learning curve.

Project Website

https://cataclysmdda.org

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open source roguelike adventure that's now even available on Steam.