[aur-general] Notification of GPL violation

[Ralf Mardorf]

Apart of whatever noise reduction is used, the possible full gated
(mute) part of this app IMO is a no-go for communication.

In (e.g. music) audio engineering this kind of gate can be used to some
degree, but if you've ever talked with somebody who's phone used this
kind of gate approach, you'll know how annoying it is.

Even assuming there should be no additional issues (such as
e.g. possible imperfect latency, lookahead, cut off workarounds) the
problem with muting by gate is:

No voice = no audio or at best noise-damped audio, unfortunately this
results in an annoying pumping sound, from silence to voice+noise to
silence. It doesn't work for communication.

For multi-track audio (video) recordings it does work, since noise is
cut away, if no signal is available, too but if a signal+noise is
available, the noise doesn't annoy, because the noise is either covered
by other tracks, or by the nature of the sound, e.g. instead of vocals,
a distorted guitar.

If audio recordings are done for speech only, by audio or video
studios, then almost all engineers are in favour of keeping the noise,
to avoid this pumping by turning noise on and off. Especially when
using a "decent microphone", it's not much needed to workaround noise
at all. Noise gates almost all of the times are only used, if
something else does cover the annoying effect of a noise gate. IOW if
e.g. another track, such as a piano backs the singer, but for a speaker
only, it's most of the times a no-go.

I might be mistaken, since I never used this app. I'm sceptic that
it is useful at all, due to my experiences of several decades of audio
and video engineering and since I worked as engineer for one of the two
famous, well known professional German microphone companies.