Joining the Project

Audacity is very helpful in getting new developers incorporated into the project's community. First off, the Audacity wiki has a New Developers Guide which includes topics such as:

• Tips for New Developers
• Platform Specific Developing Guides
• Design Topics
• Improving and Adding Features
• Bug Fixing

Audacity also has a Developer's mailing list that I immediately signed up for. The list is not only for Audacity developers but anyone else interested in following or contributing to Audacity's development. I already have been getting emails from the core development team talking about certain high priority bugs that need to be fixed in the current release.

For bug tracking and fixing, the Audacity community uses Bugzilla, a Web-based general-purpose bug-tracker and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project. Through an initial glance over Bugzilla, it seems great a keeping track of bugs and categorizing bugs by priority level, Audacity component, which OS the bug lies within, and version of Audacity.

Also, as with most open source project, Audacity keeps an I.R.C. (internet relay chat) channel up and running and hosted on the freenode.net server. To connect to it I first had to download an IRC client. For my Linux machine I downloaded Xchat and for my Android tablet I installed AndroIRC. Once connected to the freenode server, I joined the #audacity channel and used the NickServ bot to register the username "YoungBlood" for the channel so that no one else could connect to the audacity channel with this nickname. When registering my nickname i noticed a error on the Audacity wiki page concerning the IRC channel. The wiki page said that to register my nickname i would need to type in:

/msg NickServ REGISTER password

but actually you have to include an email address as well, so the command would look like:

/msg NickServ REGISTER password youremail@example.com

I informed the development team through email about the error, and they quickly fixed it as well as gave my team login credentials for any further edits we need to make ourselves.