> "Audacity is the GIMP of audio" is perfectly accurate in this regard.

This statement brings back a fond memory for me. I was first introduced to open-source software in the late 90s, when I was in high school. GIMP was one of the best known and most popular pieces of open-source software at the time. At the time there wasn't really an equivalent open-source equivalent for audio that was nearly as feature rich or popular.

I remember coming across some programmers around that time who were trying to write "GIMP for audio" -- they called it GWAMP (Gnu Wave Audio Manipulation Program) -- but it never really took off.

Then a few years later, when I was in college, I came across a programmer named Dominic Mazzoni who was working on this pre-1.0 program he called Audacity. It was still in the early stages, and didn't have anyone else working on it except his PhD advisor who had written a lot of the DSP code. Dominic and I hit it off, and I spent a lot of my college free time hacking on it, as other contributors started joining the effort too. And then it went on to succeed beyond my wildest dreams (thanks mostly to Dominic and others -- I was just in the right place at the right time).

If you had told me in the 90s that I'd have a chance to get in on the ground floor of a program that, 20 years later, was still being called the "GIMP of audio", it would have sounded too good to be true.