Tech Audio Open Source Project Guidelines

Welcome to Tech Audio's open-source community! We're glad you're interested in our work and want to provide some guidelines to help you engage with the project effectively.

If you encounter issues or have questions, please take the time to review existing resources. Familiarize yourself with our tools' features and limitations by reading the documentation contained in our GitHub repositories. Searching the GitHub issue tracker or our Discord server may reveal information about your problem. Be sure you're using the latest version of our software, as your issue may have already been resolved in a recent update. Google is a great resource as well ;)

Asking Questions

When you need to ask a question, choose the appropriate forum. Use the appropriate channel in our Discord server for general inquiries or discussions. If you think you've encountered a bug or have a specific software issue, create a GitHub issue. If you're a programmer, examine the source code for insights. When posting, use a meaningful, specific subject header and provide clear details about the symptoms of your problem. Use the provisions for code formatting where appropriate to improve legibility. Include information about the specific tool you're using, your hardware & operating system and software versions, a description of what you're trying to achieve, and what isn't working as expected. It really helps if you can provide steps to reproduce the issue. Showing that you've attempted to reproduce the issue and have taken some steps to consider the problem on your own goes a long way, and detailed information makes it easier for us or community members to help. Beyond that, please be patient and respectful.

Interpreting Answers

When you receive a response, approach it with an open mind. Sometimes the answer might point you to resources you overlooked or suggest a completely different approach. Remember, direct responses aren't rudeness, but a sign of an efficient, focused community. If you need clarification, show that you've made an effort to understand the initial response before asking for more details. It deepens your understanding of our tools, which makes the community stronger, and is a small ask for the effort we've put into building and releasing this work. And if you solve your problem, please share the solution!

Please don't take it personally if you don't receive an answer. Review your question to see if you can improve it, and consider if there are other forums where your question might be more appropriate. We provide support for our tools on a best-effort basis, but we are a small team and our resources are limited.

Project Contributions

As an open-source project, we welcome you to fork and experiment with our code. We're still determining our approach to external code or documentation contributions, so keep an eye out for updates on this. If you've encountered a problem and see someone struggling with it, please chime in but be clear, constructive, and patient. Point to relevant documentation when possible. This all makes conversations useful beyond the initial exchange and becomes a valuable contribution in itself. Another way to contribute is by sharing your successes and interesting use cases with our tools.

Feature Requests and Project Direction

It's important to understand that our tools are a work in progress. We're generally welcome to discussions about the project, and Discord is the right place for that. It's particularly helpful to provide feedback about your specific workflows/techniques that work well or don't work with our software. And while we value every suggestion, we can't pursue every idea and feature requests are just that: suggestions rather than commitments. If you have specific needs that our current tools don't meet, we're open to discussions about custom software development -- in which case, please reach out to explore potential arrangements.

Thank you for your interest in what we do -- our decision to open-source is an experiment to make our work broadly available and develop a community surrounding it. Your thoughtful participation, constructive feedback, and respect for the guidelines we've outlined will determine whether this becomes a positive, ongoing initiative or not. We're optimistic!