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FTA: "it can't match commercial products like Adobe's Audition software for studio recording".

This isn't true. We tried out all the commercial OSX apps, including Adobe soundbooth (audition isn't availiable on Mac) and found Audacity was the best fit for a small VO studio. Bells and whistles count for nothing if the basic audio editing features aren't up to scratch. Audacity isn't without problems or bugs and I'm not saying that, in fact the source code freely mixes GUI and processing code -- ick! Functionally for basic editing workflow, there's nothing wrong with it and this is something you can't say about the commercial apps.

FTA: "The GUI is also rather plain and not as easy to read as some paid-for alternatives".

So says someone who never ran bias peak or thinks slick UI design makes a professionally usable tool. The UI for a 1/4", blade and chinagraph was good enough for 40 years, the Audacity interface is perfectly serviceable.

Of course, I use sweep at home ;-)

Until they realise that most of their professional-level software isn't installed in these packages...

i want to know when someone is going to post "an intro to editing audio on BSD" article.

i do not use linux, and if at all possible, would like to avoid using it at all costs. i have a dual opteron box set aside for my recording projects, but it is just sitting there awaiting the purchase of an rme hdsp 9652. i figured i would just install gentoo and ardour etc and be ready to go. however, i really dont want to install linux just to be able to record multitrack audio. i want to stay in an environment that i am comfortable with.

i believe paul davis (the creator of ardour) once said there are some real time performance issues as non-root users with the freebsd kernel, amongst other things, therefore, ardour will not be ported to freebsd. there are patches for the linux kernel to address these issues, i am sure someone talented out there could address the same thing for freebsd. then there is ALSA to deal with. ALSA has support for many interfaces. OSS doesnt seem as if they can support the newer cards out there.
several weeks ago, there was a post on the ardour mailing list by someone showing interest in ardour on freebsd. i was thinking i was the only one wanting ardour on something other than linux/osx.

by nigel weeks:
Just wondering if there's any efforts to get Ardour running on FreeBSD. Jack's in and fine, I've lowered the latency(HZ parameter in the Kernel, and removed unnecessary modules). I'll have a bash at it, but if someone's already making headway, I'd rather no re-invent the wheel.

it would be great if ardour could run on freebsd. linux isnt the only alternative to windows/mac. i thought open source was about having options. there should be a bsd option. hopefully this reaches more people interested in the same goal.

ranting aside, anyone know of any decent multitrack recording software that will run on bsd? someone previously mentioned sweep, and i have found that it is a million times better than audacity. im sure im not the only one that wants to know of other great software for recording audio.

Indeed. I'm surprised the article didn't cover Sweep, which has also been making inroads into some professional studios, and has some high profile supporters (Pixar being the obvious one).

Sweep

From the site:
"Sweep is an audio editor and live playback tool for GNU/Linux, BSD and compatible systems. It supports many music and voice formats including WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and MP3, with multichannel editing and LADSPA effects plugins. It is Free Software, available under the GNU General Public Licence. "

Enjoy :-)

There are already recording studios that use Sweep. I know that diversity is always good, but it doesn't look like Audacity gives anything that Sweep doesn't already, and has been doing for some time.

Well, I just had a quick look on Freshmeat and found:

RoseGarden
Sweep
Ardour
Audacity
Protux
DAP
ReZound
GLAME

I've bee researching exactly that (a replacement for Cool Edit Pro). The best option seems to be Sweep.

It appears they are still active. Maybe they use the mailing-list instead of forums.

It may just be the only OSS tool in the motion picture industry.

I know sweep, an opensource sound editor is used widely, and in fact was partly funded by Pixar.