The parent company is a multi-national company and it has been trying to start a data-collection mechanism in the software. The same company owns other projects in its portfolio such as Ultimate Guitar (Famous website for Guitar enthuisasts) and MuseScore (Open source music notation software).Įver since, Audacity has been a heated topic. Download and give it a try for yourself.The famous open source audio manipulation program was acquired by a company named Muse Group two months ago. If you are new to sound editing or are looking for a program that does this kind of thing, you can’t go wrong with Audacity. If you work a lot with sound files you probably already know about Audacity. Audacity is licensed under the GPL and can be packaged with other products if that is something you would like to do. There are also forums, FAQs and other forms of help available on the web site. Speaking of the website, there is also an Audacity Store where you can buy Audacity logo apparel that supports the development efforts. All of the documentation and notes on how to install and use the plug-ins are on the Audacity web site. Audacity can also use plug-ins in the NYquist format. Similar to plug-ins for Photoshop, the plugins add all kinds of filters for different sound editing and effects. There are 100’s of these for Linux and at least 90 that run on Windows. The most popular are the LADSPA plug-ins for effects. It may turn out that for what you are doing, you never need to progress beyond that point.Īs I mentioned earlier Audacity integrates a long list of 3rd party plug-ins. I would stick to the basics until you get familiar with the interface. There are a lot of features that you may not use right away in audacity.You import or export audio files in to “open” them in audacity. Open and saving files means you are open and saving audacity projects.You just follow the link on the Audacity website to the Lame site and it is really easy. To export to MP3 format you need to download and install the Lame MP3 encoder.Once installed you work in the main Audacity screen (Windows version) shown below: There should be some news on the highly anticipated 2.0 version soon. The current stable release is 1.2 and the beta is 1.3. My experience has been that the beta versions are very stable. Don’t be fooled by the version you download being labeled a beta. Just download the appropriate install package and follow the on screen instructions. It is as slick and polished as any commercial app in its class. This is a product that is tried and true. It supports a very wide range of plug ins that extend the base functionality even further. Audacity is great for recording, Importing and Exporting files in a wide range of formats, editing sound files, adding effects, improving sound quality and sound analysis. Also it has language support for almost 50 different languages. 2 or at your option if you distribute, you can use a later version of GPLĪudacity runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and several other systems. OS supported: Windows, Mac, Linux and others At this point along with a product called “The Levelator” it is all I use to edit my podcast audio files. Since then I have had a very cozy relationship with Audacity. I was just starting up my own podcast and asked Martin how are you supposed to splice in music, edit out pops and cracks and otherwise make your recording listenable? One word was his answer: Audacity. I was first turned on to Audacity about 4 years ago by my friend Martin McKeay of the Network Security Podcast. Short of a professional sound engineer to do it for you that is. Audacity does it all! It is open, free and with lots of plug ins available there is little need for anything else. You can change your sound file from stereo to mono, change its bit rate and just about any other attribute of your sound file. On top of this you can convert one format of audio file to another really easily. You can splice parts in and out, you can merge in multiple tracks and you can perform an amazing array of effects to your audio files. Audacity allows you to graphically “see” an audio file. Audacity is a key part in just about every podcaster’s toolbox.
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