Audacity 1.2.0 Released

mbrubeck writes "After almost two years of development, the free cross-platform sound editor Audacity has released a new stable version for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Audacity 1.2 has major improvements including professional-quality dithering and resampling, and new pitch- and speed-changing effects. Our previous stable release was announced on Slashdot in June 2002. More recently, Audacity was presented at this year's CodeCon in San Francisco."

Comments

Fedora

[geogeek6_7]

Good job, Audacity! Hopefully this release makes it into the Fedora repository.

Re:Fedora

[Jameth]

Just make a package yourself and send it as a contrib. What's with the pathetic 'hoping'?

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get it from

http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/planetccrma/softwa re /

using apt.

Re:Fedora

[bonch]

Because not everyone is a developer or even savvy enough to package something, and so they "pathetically hope" some heroic person will do this stuff for them. These peons we call users.

Re:Fedora

[Slashcrunch]

I got mine with apt in Fedora from ayo.freshrpms.net

Nice!

Slashdot math...

[Anonymous Coward]

2004-2000 = ~ 2 years

Re:Slashdot math...

[Anonymous Coward]

~2 == 01 years

Re:Slashdot math...

[Short Circuit]

You big-endian biggot.

Where I'm from, it's "10"

(j/k)

Re:Slashdot math...

[Pius II.]

"Big endian is where the most significant byte is stored at the lowest address, and the least significant bit is stored at the highest address. "
- everything2.com

So you're the big-endian one.

Re:Slashdot math...

[adamruck]

yeah I was going to say... endian ordering has to deal with how bytes(not bits) are ordered in memory. This is more apparent when you try and code some 2d arrays in assembly.

Re:Slashdot math...

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

2004-2000 = ~ 2 years

To clarify, it has been two years since we last released a stable version of Audacity, version 1.0.

Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer

Re:Slashdot math...

[stor]

Hey Dominic!

I just wanted to let you know:

I was flipping through a PC Mag at Sydney airport while waiting for a plane and it had a section reviewing sound applications.

So there was SoundForge, CoolEdit, a wholy bunch of expensive proprietary Windows sound applications and... Audacity!

I had to blink to ensure I wasn't hallucinating. It got a good review, too. The reviewer was impressed.

Just thought you'd like to know that you're officially playing with the big boys.

Cheers
Stor

Re:Slashdot math...

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Cool, thanks! I've seen Audacity in a couple magazines, but if you happen to remember which one, please let me know, thanks!

Re:Slashdot math...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all the posts to get a response from the lead developer I didn't think it would be mine. I was just being facetious anyway :) Keep up the good work though. I feel strongly that Audacity will flourish, especially when you have developers who actually interact with the people using their product. Kudos to you!

Finally

[Underholdning]

Anyone interested in Audacity should pay their Audacity Wiki! homepage a visit. Audacity is open source, cross platform and it actually works. If you haven't tried it yet, now is the time.

Re:Finally

[TheLink]

I'm looking for digital Dolby B/Dolby C filters to convert some dolby tape recordings to CD.

http://www.dolby.com/cassette/bcsnr/ctype.html

Looks like Audacity doesn't do it yet. Doesn't seem to be an easy way to do a complete Dolby B/C filter digitally - it's not static - the filtering depends on sound output levels. Can do a simplistic one I suppose.

Re:Finally

[Sandor at the Zoo]

From the wiki page:

Audacity topics
AboutAudacity
CurrentFeatures
UsingAudac ity
RecordingTips
EffectsTips
KeyboardLayouts
Platform-specific issues:
WindowsIssues
...

Maybe it's just me, but where's the frickin' download link?

Re:Finally

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

From the wiki page: ...
Maybe it's just me, but where's the frickin' download link?

The Audacity homepage is http://audacity.sourceforge.net. There are nice, big, download links there.

The Audacity Wiki is a community-maintained site for organizing information and resources relating to Audacity. It's publicly editable, so if you want to put download links there, you're welcome to do so!

Re:Finally

[BlitzPig_Sal]

I'm curious, is there any particular reason why you would not just use the hardware Dolby filters in your playback tape machine before the A/D?

Re:Finally

[Digi-John]

All you have to do is run a cable from the output on a tape player to the line in of your sound card. Set line in as the recording device, start a program to record a wav, and hit play on the tape player. Then go through with Audacity and separate the songs. I've done it before, it works fine.

Actually, for simply getting the tracks from a tape to your hard drive, Gramofile might be a better fit, although I have never used it. Anyway, good luck!

Re:Finally

[Rysc]

Anyone interested in Audacity should pay

Pay? Why the fuck should I pay? Yet another open source project begging for money 'cause it's so-oo cool.

their Audacity Wiki! homepage a visit. Audacity is open source, cross platform and it actually works. If you haven't tried it yet, now is the time.

Er. Oops.

Hopefully studio costs going down

[192939495969798999]

Hopefully open source software will help make studio recording costs go down... it costs a freaking fortune to record a band/etc., and that's part of the reason that artists get little out of their gross profits.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Anonymous Coward]

With Ardour, JAMin, and Audacity my cost (software) to record is $0.00.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[m00nun1t]

Software is a trivial cost in the grand scheme of things. Mixing desks, monitors, amps, sound proofing, mics, and of course rent & engineer fees are far more.

For example, you can get a top of the line recording package such as Logic Audio for around $1000. However, a decent vocal microphone such as a Neumann U87 will set you back around $3000.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[LizardKing]

Software is a trivial cost in the grand scheme of things

That really depends on what you are trying to acheive. If you want a respectable home setup, then software is likely a major part of the cost. Most amateur and semi-pro setups now consist largely of direct to disk recorders and editing suites. Effects, synths and samplers implemented in software are increasingly replacing standalone hardware.

a decent vocal microphone such as a Neumann U87 will set you back around $3000

That's not a "decent" vocal mic, it's an exceptional one. For most people recording popular music styles (be it rock or dance stuff) will not need anything more sophisticated than a Shure SM mic which will set them back $100.

Chris

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Gabrill]

$1000 is trivial? You must must be one of those successful nerds.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[millahtime]

Does Audiocity really rank up there with Protools, reason and/or other expensive software apps that are used now??

Just from what I have seen, those apps have more to them. Am I missing something??

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[BlackHawk-666]

I don't see the cost of an audio editing program affecting the overall cost of record production. Records cost so much because they hire engineers, prodcuers, marketeers (like bucaneers but robbing your cash not your jewels) and then have to also pay the band. Let's not forget the prohibitive cost of a Neve console or an Appoge sound channel. The 200 or so they will save on a commercial audio product is not really going to make a noticeable difference here.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[BlackHawk-666]

A Rode NT 2 would be a better choice for home studio use since it is a cheap but decent capacitor mic. They go for around the 200 mark IIRC. CuBase however is more like 600 - 1000 (Nuendo) so even in a project studio this is going to make little difference to the setup costs.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[0x0d0a]

I've always wondered how unnecessarily inflated those prices are.

I was skimming through some audio forums a while ago when considering getting a nice (well, by my standards) pair of headphones. I was surprised by what a lot of musicians were using for live performances -- relatively inexpensive microphones and headphones. Unless the standard for recording is *far* higher than for live performances, it just seems that musicians are getting overcharged.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a zillion dollar amp and zillion dollar microphone sound nice...but are they worth the order of magnitude increase over the next-lower grade of audio hardware?

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[m00nun1t]

Most rock music with any budget would be done with a decent mic such as a U87 (I don't use the word exceptional as better mics are available). The difference between a U87 and an SM58 is enormous, can't even begin to compare the two. I wouldn't use an SM58 even for a demo tape. A rode would be good for a demo as another poster suggested.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[gordguide]

" ... unless the standard for recording is *far* higher than for live performances, it just seems that musicians are getting overcharged. ..."

Bingo.

Live performing requires rugged microphones. Workhorses like the Shures mentioned earlier are preferred.

A Neumann will explode if you blow on it. Send in for repair. Spend $2000.

But, there is no comparison in the sound.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[LizardKing]

Most rock music with any budget would be done with a decent mic such as a U87

Again, it depends on the budget. I have recorded on top flight digital stuff as well as two inch analogue tape, and the difference in quality was not noticable to the human ear. The overall quality of the recording is rarely down to the equipment used, more often it depends on the ability of the engineer / producer.

Chris

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[LizardKing]

Another thing that adds to the recording costs of major label artists is that they frequently go into the studio with no completed material. The label demands a new album when the band has just finished touring to support the last one. Enthusiasm and energy are at a low ebb, and the band spend ages knocking new material together. This often gets written off as "pre-production".

Chris

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[m00nun1t]

Live equipment has a whole different set of requirements than studio gear, so you can't say the standard is "higher", just different. Let's compare the top two mics, live is SM58, studio is U87.
They are fundamentally different, SM58 is a dynamic mic, U87 is condenser. Dynamic mics tend to be less sensitive (a good thing on a loud stage), are very robust (it's live, stuff gets dropped & thrown around), have good feedback rejection, and a frequency response that gives them maximum cut through in a live mix. A u87 has none of these things. It is designed to be sensitive and sound beautiful. It is designed to be treated with kid gloves. Is $3000 a rip off? Maybe, maybe not. But if someone else comes up with a mic that sounds as good for less, I'm all ears.

Remember when you look around audio forums and look at what "most musicians" are using, remember that "most musicians" have little money and have either no ear or just never been exposed to high end gear to appreciate the real difference. Find a good shop and a helpful sales person, bring along a well mixed CD you know well, and listen to a few pairs of headphones - listen to the $50 ones and the $500 ones and make up your own mind. Personally, I have a set of Beyer DT770 headphones. Not the *best* sounding for the money, but good for studio work where isolation is also important. A good balance, around $220.

(Note: while I like it, the U87 isn't my favourite studio vocal mic. I prefer the TLM 170 - the warmth of a U87 but much clearer).

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Lumpy]

exactly. I know of almost NO studios that put >$200.00 mic's in front of artists espically rock or rap artists.

sound proofing is dirt cheap... you don't have to buy real sonex and citiscape ceiling tiles at $100.00 per 2foot X 2foot panel. a mixing console will cost very VERY little today. no you don't need a 200 channel automated mixing station. Most studios now get away with a single 24 channel mackie and have the software controlling the 24 track soundcard do most of the work... as well as 99% of all mixing is done in the computer now.

you can set up a good quality recording studio in your basement for less than $10,000.00 with open source tools.
I know, I recently hepled one artist build his.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Tet]

Hopefully open source software will help make studio recording costs go down

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.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[joto]

Exactly. But then again, there's this thing known as piracy, which really helps to bring the prices down for hobbyists, and up for everyone else.

There's also a strange tendency to offer multiple versions of the same software, the cheapest being crippled beyond usefulness, and the top version with totally unreasonable price. I wonder if they instead just sold one version at an affordable price, they would get more popularity points. It seems like FL studio is the only reasonably priced midi/audio studio software out there, although even they follow the practice of offering crippled versions.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[ldspartan]

If I walked into a Studio I was paying >$100/hr total cost to use, and saw a Mackie SR24.4, I would walk right back out. Even if the sound quality was top flight, the 60mm faders are just too small for most work. 24 channel mackie's are fine for small venues and community theatre, but not a recording studio anyone is paying for.

--
Phil

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[irexe]

I'd say the Foo Fighters have budget. You see Dave Grohl singing into an SM 57 in the Monkey Wrench vid. SM57's are quite popular and quite cheap.

That aside, I am a recording and performing electronic artist an a certified audio engineer. Software is _the_ major cost factor for most home studios (including successful dance producers!!). We use all open source/self written stuff though.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[clifyt]

Unfortunately, piracy fucks everyone over.

Why did Cubase get sold for dirt cheep to a company that doesn't even understand DAWs (and rumor has it, more than half of the selling price went DIRECTLY to paying the debt of the company...the new company didn't assume any of this).

Piracy is the assholes way of doing anything. If you want something that costs, pay for it. If you don't want to pay the costs that they want you to, don't use it. Audacity is something I've actually installed at a clients place in the past because he wanted me to give him a copy of Cakewake (the guy is willing to pay my $75 an hour, but not willing to buy a $300 software -- one that would EASILY be made up in the cost of dealing with crack and hack issues that always come up with pirated apps).

The thing folks don't understand about the music industry is that that guys that are making money at this stuff do not pay for it. Its used as advertisement in exchange for endorsements. I haven't paid for software in YEARS, yet everything is legit. Then again, I know enough bigger guys and can convert them to different softwares that they see my getting the software as a plus.

The hobbiest is the market each and every one of these music companies are targetting. They want (fuck, I can't even think of why the kiddies listen to these days...I work with old farts that might not sell a billion albums, but consistantly put out decent albums that sell midrange...they are the insurance acts of the industry). They want ******* to say they used some software so every f'n kiddie in the world wants to use it and buys a legitimate copy. They want everyone to know they use Martin Guitars or Zildian cymbals or Yamaha synths or whatever, when the average person would be fine with a Soundblaster (yech) and a pawn shopped $50 instrument.

So, you do a diservice by pirating any of this shit...you do a disservice to the whole community by pirating it. Do yourself a favor and check out the free softwares because they will do 90% of what the end user wants and needs and if they need that extra 10% -- then a grand is NOT a lot of money for that software.

Don't fuck over the software companies just because they aren't offering something you can't steal. Would you claim that theft keeps down the prices on guitars for hobbiests? If so, you are a dumbass. Just because its bits and bytes on magnetic media doesn't make it any less theft. I wish we would stop calling this stuff piracy and start calling it outright theivery.

Time to download the lastest Audacity and see what it has...

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[blackmonday]

While I wouldn't use an SM58 for anything other than live use, the SM57, its twin brother, will do great. The difference between these two mics is the shape and endpiece (flat VS a pop filter). That's all. Other than that they're identical.

Not only is the $90 SM57 the world standard for recording guitar cabinets, Michael Jackson used it for lead vocals on Thriller (spare the jokes its a kickass record). Of course a nice mic pre can be very pricey, but in a pinch use your mixer's pre and be done with it.

I'll take great musicians through crappy equipment over the inverse any day.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[blackmonday]

I'm a huge fan of open source tools, but there's just no software out there to compete with the big boys. Audacity is great as a learning tool, but you'll never find it in a professional recording studio. Steinberg's Cubase and Nuendo, and Digi's Pro Tools, and Apple's Logic division are not worrying about the free competition yet.

And OK I'm not trolling here, but Audacity is just not that great. I tried using it to record a simple demo, and I just didn't find it useful. I'm glad its open source and it'll surely improve, but the simple free program that came with my Mac to record audio is better. Seriously. Ultimately maybe Audacity will kick Pro Tools' ass, but I just don't see it coming yet.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[afidel]

You don't have to spend huge amounts of money to get great sounding headphones. I personally own a pair of Sennheiser HD 495's. Only set me back $60 and they blow away almost anything under $150 (check out this graph to see how they perform). I would love to spend $200+ on a great pair of headphones but not in this crappy economy.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[TheLink]

I bet there are tons of better mikes than the Shure SM58s and 565s in terms of audio quality. BUT so far I haven't had any dead shures at my church - period > 3-4 years (don't know how old the oldest are - they were bought by someone else ).

They appear to put up with quite a lot of abuse - teenagers, children, singers who scream at em, thump em, drop em etc. The other non-Shures have broken in two (it was a _metal_ mike too, not one of those crap plastic ones), or just stopped working, etc.

Only had to get replacements coz people lose them (stuff happens - people take em to some camp or something and forget to bring them back).

Actually if you look at many of the pop music recordings in a wave editor you can see tons of clipping - the square waves are rounded off by devices/filters tho, so they don't sound as harsh. So with such "commitment to quality" why bother with expensive equipment?

Heck even an amateur like me can do better than that. If you have money get 24 bit recorders and record at a lower gain/volume then stick it to 16 bits without any clipping - sheesh.

You need the expensive stuff for those audiophile recordings - those golden eared folk do notice, the cheap stuff will do for pop/rock - I mean the half-deaf kids with earphones don't really care about the diff between mp3 and CD, so you think they'd care about the diff between a USD100-200 mike and a USD2000-3000+ mike? Heck nowadays most pop/rave stuff is electronic (synth drums), so USD100 vocal mikes will do - the rest can be direct digital, or direct analogue (electric guitars).

Funny thing is - do those audiophile stuff actually make much money ? There's a lot less marketing costs I suppose.

As for how inflated prices are. You can get a LOT more tech per buck for computer stuff than for music/audio stuff. Even frigging tambourines aren't cheap. I wonder how much is a triangle.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[tigeba]

Just as a point of information, studio microphones are not inherently fragile (from a sound reproduction perspective. Large diaphragm condenser microphones (like the Neumann U87) are routinely used to capture VERY loud sources like drums, guitars, etc. While it makes me cringe a little, I have seen a guy use a U47 (old, rare and cranky Neumann/Telefunken) on a bass drum. You could probably set a bomb off next to the more modern transistor based mics like a TLM103. I use it routinely for drums and other harsh sources.

These microphones are hardly fragile in this sense, but we hate you blowing on them because: It sounds like crap, and we dont want you getting your monkey spit on our really expensive mic.

Lots of folks would reach for a modern reproduction of vintage Neumann/Telefunken mics these days, like the ones make by Soundelux. You get the great vintage sound, and modern durability and reliability.

Unlike lets say, an SM57, these types of microphones are generally not suited for live performance (ie. being held by a vocalist) because they are not designed to reject handling noise, and well, generally suck if you touch them. Since this is /. I should point out that the venerable (and cheap, so cheap its practically open source) SM57/SM58 is commonly used to record vocals. For example Bono has recorded just about all his vocals with an SM58. The ol 57/58 almost always work ok for things like snare drums, and even guitar cabinets.

You are probably thinking to yourself "All I need is Audacity and a pile of crappy mics and I'm ready to be a rock star". Sorry, but you really cannot cheap out on the mics entirely. Even worse, you cannot cheap out on mic preamps. Don't even get me started about how something like a "lowly" mic preamp can make such a big difference in the sound of a recording, but that is another discussion entirely. At this point, you cannot entirely eliminate the analog domain if you are recording acoustic sources. You can greatly reduce the number of analog compressors/limiters preamps that you need, but you still need them. And if you have crappy ones, the result will be crappy.

Since this discussion is supposed to be about Audacity, I agree that it is great that Linux is getting audio tools. However, if you want to make music right now, don't waste your time with this. Bite the bullet and use your Wintel or Mac and use one of the many very reasonably priced apps (Heck, use garageband). There are a few "core" plugins (Waves for example) that truly make digital recording feasable, and Audacity would at the bare minimum need to support these to be a contender. In addition, the latency appears to be absolutely dreadful under Linux. Personally I understand that I am spoiled as I use a Protools HD system (which has extremely low, or effectively no latency), but there are many host based systems that can acheive fairly low latency. You simply cannot record musicians in some sort of multi-track setting if they cannot monitor properly.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

I'm a huge fan of open source tools, but there's just no software out there to compete with the big boys. Audacity is great as a learning tool, but you'll never find it in a professional recording studio. Steinberg's Cubase and Nuendo, and Digi's Pro Tools, and Apple's Logic division are not worrying about the free competition yet.

There's a big difference: Audacity is free, and so there's no reason professional recording studios couldn't use Audacity in addition to everything else. If Audacity does just one thing better (or faster, or easier), then there's no reason not to keep it around.

And OK I'm not trolling here, but Audacity is just not that great. I tried using it to record a simple demo, and I just didn't find it useful. I'm glad its open source and it'll surely improve, but the simple free program that came with my Mac to record audio is better.

I don't think you've tried Audacity since version 1.0. Or maybe I forgot and the Mac sound recorder had support for 32-bit-float samples, on-the-fly resampling, and noise removal?

Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Does Audiocity [sic] really rank up there with Protools, reason and/or other expensive software apps that are used now??

Of course not. But it's free, it runs natively on 3+ platforms, it's good enough for probably 90% of the people who need to do some simple sound recording, editing, and mixing, and it has some unique useful features that are helpful even to professionals. Plus, it's open-source, so it's possible to customize it for specific needs.

Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

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.

One huge difference is that Sweep only runs on Linux (and a few other Unix-like systems). Audacity runs natively on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.

Also, last time I checked, Sweep is still an in-memory audio editor. Good luck trying to mix an entire CD-length album if you only have 256 MB of RAM. Audacity is disk-based and can do all of its processing in non-real-time, so you can edit and mix a large album with many tracks on a slow computer with only a little bit of RAM.

Sweep has a lot of neat features, though. They're both free, so if you use Linux, why not grab both, and use each where appropriate?

Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[AstroDrabb]

That guy was just trolling. I use Audacity under Linux and WinXP and it is excellent. I am not an audio pro, but what I need to do, Audacity was better then the other apps I tried. I record speeches/sermons to an MP3 recorder and when converted to wav, they take up 700MB to 1GB. Audaicy opens those big files with no problems. And the best part is that editing is very very fast. The other apps I tried would either not be able to load the files or be extremely sloooow trying to do any editing.

Thanks for the great app!

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[gordguide]

Umm, I was using a bit (not much, mind you) of hyperbole there.

Sometimes I tell musicians that "it will explode if you look at it funny." The point being that people who are used to SM58's sometimes expect they can knock the mic stand over and any mic will take it. Some won't, and they're my microphones.

Some kid who saw one too many videos of the Who with Roger Daltry whipping the mic around like a rodeo cowboy can cost me a lot of money.

I'm not "ready to be a rock star" anymore now than when I was recording on a 3440 25 years ago. But, some bands have got record deals based on demo tapes and CDs I recorded for them. At that point, my work is done and done well.

Getting back on topic, Audacity is a decent entry-level tool on Linux, although I was disappointed to read the release note on buggy 96K support.

Mac and Windows users have alternatives, like Bias Peak ME or ProTools Free (both are free, stripped down versions of commercial tools and all three will do the job if you're not too demanding).

None are substitutes for the better quality paid apps yet, but they do have a place in a musician's arsenal of tools. Audacity did recognize my RME soundcard right away, that's a good start.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[tigeba]

I believe MJ used a Sure SM7 to record thriller. A popular broadcast mic, but quite a different beast. That being said, there are many artists who record their vocals with a SM57/58. Bono is a popular example.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[adam872]

I would argue that studio costs have come down significantly in the last 10 years, since DAW's (Digital Audio Workstations) came on the market. It is now possible to build up a semi pro recording rig for only a few thousand dollars now, whereas before the analogue multitrack tape machines were often tens of thousands of dollars by themselves. Leaving aside the analogue vs digital debate (pointless IMHO), I think it's possible to produce very good recordings fairly cheaply with a PC/MAC based solution these days.

The thing to remember is that the recording software is only a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of the other equipment. Good mics and outboard equipment is where the majority of the money goes (not to mention preamps and mixing desks if your needs extend that far).

Of course, a good pair ears and some skill is the most valuable asset in a studio :)

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[blackmonday]

Hi Dominic, not trolling, but impressed that you replied. My Mac came with this program, and it's very cool. I believe it's only free if bundled with the mac, it seems to be shareware, and I like it better than Audacity.

By the way, my sister is in college and they're teaching audio recording 101 with....Audacity. Congratulations, I think that's very noteworthy. I didn't mean to put your efforts down in my post.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Tet]

Sweep has a lot of neat features, though. They're both free, so if you use Linux, why not grab both, and use each where appropriate?

Agreed completely. I didn't realise the disk vs memory based difference. But like you say, use whichever is most appropriate to what you need. A little competition never harmed anyone, and will hopefully serve to improve both projects...

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[JabberWokky]

Steinberg's Cubase and Nuendo, and Digi's Pro Tools, and Apple's Logic division are not worrying about the free competition yet. No, but then, neither are MS Word, PeopleSoft's HR Tools or SNK King of Fighters series worrying about the competition from Audacity. However, when you compare it to the windows software that exists in every single radio station, such as GoldWave, usually running on some Win98 computer in the corner, you're looking at a really nice drop in replacement.

This software is used to record a voice, lay it in over a track from a CD, and then possibly, at the most technically advanced, compress the time on the voice a bit. In other words, make ads, which is what radio stations do all day. In many stations, even today, you then dump it to a cart... basically an eight-track. For the rest, you load it up into a system that stores all the ads.

This is perfect for that use, and as a result, this is a useful piece of software. I'd also say that it's good for throwing up while rehearsing or jamming to nab stuff in case you hear something really nice.

--
Evan

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Unknown Lamer]

Ardour.

I don't really need to say much more...it is an excellent replacement for a stand alone HDR system.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Razor Blades are Not]

All other considerations aside, that is a video, and therefore no guarantee whatsoever that he used the same mic that was used during recording.

And secondly, Shures are used for live work very often. They're just not as popular as condensers for vocals in the studio.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Hi Dominic, not trolling, but impressed that you replied. My Mac came with this program, and it's very cool. I believe it's only free if bundled with the mac, it seems to be shareware, and I like it better than Audacity.

Well, I guess we've got a long way to go! If you think that Audacity has any hope, I'd encourage you to visit our feature request page and suggest the particular features you want.

By the way, my sister is in college and they're teaching audio recording 101 with....Audacity. Congratulations, I think that's very noteworthy. I didn't mean to put your efforts down in my post.

Very cool. No offense taken. There's no way that Audacity can be everything to everyone. But we're working very hard to make it as good as possible.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Kevin DeGraaf]

the software controlling the 24 track soundcard

Could you recommend such a card (make/model) and software to run it? My budget and needs are more in line with 12-16 tracks, but 24 would be acceptable as well.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Anonymous Coward]

thank you.

this is what I use WITH audacity and soundgarden AND many other oss tools plus 2 8 channel sound cards (ALSA supported!)

yes you CAN do what the mid level sound recording studio can for gobs less. and more and more artists are doing exactly that. flipping the bird to the overpaid- overpriced recording studios and building their own in their basements. (plywood floor on high density foam, insulated walls with c channel suspension for the drywall + carpet covering + cheap sonex ,etc....

I can certianly do as good in my basement studio as any RIAA CD that is on the market right now.
(and no, I agree, that is NOT saying much.. RIAA music generally SUCKS, the mastering is horrid and overall the audio quality is crap.)

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Anonymous Coward]

if you are using faders during a recording session then you are a wanna-be hack.

record ALL TRACKS at full volume / best dynamic range, THEN in editing you adjust levles, mix, etc..

only fools do it by hand.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Kent Recal]

I'll take great musicians through crappy equipment over the inverse any day.

Wish I had modpoints.
+1 In*

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Lumpy]

we used old cards 2, 8 track cards that were ALSA compatable... 8 in 8 out at the same time...

TerraTec EWS88MT is what I used. they are hard to find right now.. but look in the ALSA documentation to find what other brands are supported.

look for a ICE1712 based card like the Envy24 I think they are still made.

the nice part is that these types of cards are at least 30 times better than anything creative makes, they are almost completely silent.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[detect]

Any further pointers as to how to soundproof a room dirt cheap?

Cheers..

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Mr. Slippery]

I'd say the Foo Fighters have budget. You see Dave Grohl singing into an SM 57 in the Monkey Wrench vid. SM57's are quite popular and quite cheap.

The SM 57 and 58 are pretty much the default for live sound; one is for vocals, one for instruments, the same core but different housing that affects the frequency response. (I'm not an audio engineer, but in addition to occasionally playing out at bars and such I've been helping set up sound at the Free Spirit Festival for the past few years, so I've started to pay attention to these things.) You can get them for around $60 used.

For those not familiar with mics: these are dynamic mics, which are basically teeny tiny generators - a moving coil generates current. This means that your microphone has to be an energy source.

In a condenser mics, OTOH, you're moving one plate of a capacitor (condenser == capacitor), changing capacitance and thus impedence to your AC signal. That plate is typically lighter than a coil, so condensor mics track the air pressure changes - the sound - better, with wider-range and flatter frequency response and better transient response. The price is that you have to supply power ("phantom power") to it.

You can pay as much as you want to for a condensor mic :-). I have an AKG C1000 which is affordable (under $200), can power itself of an internal 9V battery, and is rugged enough to cart around. It definitely has a brighter, cleaner sound than my SM 57/58s, and I'll probably be using it when I record my CD later this year. (My resolutions for this year: 1. get a story or poem published, 2. make a CD of my original songs.)

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[m00nun1t]

Hate to break it to you, the SM57 and SM58 have different frequency responses. SM58 peaks around 3.5K, SM57 around 2 - 2.5K. There may be other differences, not sure. They are certainly *not* the same mic with a different end.

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

[Lumpy]

here is a ton of links

google is your friend, and I strongly suggest you buy the first two books listed at amazon.com one is for more professional setups but it helps you understand how to cut corners..

Linux On The Desktop

[osewa77]

Programs like this are a big step forward for the dream of "Linux on the Desktop"

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

haha, uhh not quite :)

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[Underholdning]

I'd like to see linux on the desktop as much as the next guy, but I really don't see why this program, albeit great, helps. Linux on the desktop will not happen until my mother can install linux. She can install Win XP, but she's not even close to installing a standard Debian. Since Audacity is cross platform, it really doesn't give linux any edge at all.

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

When it get's as good as CoolEdit for Windows wake me up.

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[revividus]

This is a step toward desktop acceptance of Linux. These type of programs are among those that get brought up when people say "But I work with music and Linux doesnt have xyz-tools....".

It being cross-platform is even better for Linux, because it means people who begin using it on Windows (for example) could easily switch to Linux at a later date.

Also, your mom will not need to be able to install Linux (IMHO) -- rather, she'll have to be able to go to Best Buy (or wherever) and say...

Your mom: I need a new computer.
Best Buy: Do you want Linux or Windows on that?
Your mom: What's the difference?
Best Buy: It's $50 cheaper with Linux.
Your mom: Can I still do [random sampling of standard PC activities/file opening/web browsing]?
Best Buy: Yup.
Your mom: Sure, why not.

Now, when that conversation can take place, then Linux on the desktop will have "arrived". IMHO. But then, I use it already.

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[zeeboy]

You're comment is bogus.

I do installs of most flavors of Linux and installs of every flavor of Windows.

Hands down, the Linux distros that are aimed at your mother, which Debian IS NOT, are far easier to install than XP. If you think your mother will have an easy time installing XP, then you have never done so yourself. I'm tired of hearing this mindless drivel about installation. The war has been won hands down by Mandrake/SuSE/Redhat in ease of installation.

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and there have never been any Americans in Baghdad, EVER! Even now, the Iraqis crush them mercilessly!

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[bonch]

It's great that people are trying to get recording tools up on Linux, but the fact that most people can't even get their sound cards working without problems to begin with.

Not to mention, apps like Cubase SX 2 and specifically Sonar 3 XL are so far ahead now in the Windows realm, it's going to take quite a lot for the free Linux apps to catch up. There are already freeware tools for Windows, yet few use them because the commercial solutions are extremely powerful (particularly Cakewalk's MIDI capabilities...and I even use Fruityloops as a VST plug-in and create drum tracks inside a Cakewalk project...I don't expect to be doing something like that in Linux any time soon).

Linux is too much of a moving target right now. Once it settles down a bit and people feel comfortable writing apps that will still run correctly in a year, we'll see a big explosion of apps (not to mention once we get KDE/GNOME/X replaced with something sane and modern--think something in the style of OS X but running on Linux).

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[yog]

I think the OP's point was that Linux users (not necessarily your mother but people who consciously want to adopt Linux despite the lack of some software availability) now have one more useful tool that runs natively and one less reason to have to run Windows. The fact that Audacity is cross-platform is only good news; it can get adopted more widely this way. Spreading the roots makes the tree stronger.

I think CoolEdit and its successor Adobe Audition are slicker, more mature products, but Audacity does a lot of the same basic audio editing stuff natively in Linux, and it's only getting more powerful. I've been using 1.2rc1 for several months and I love the new effects that have been implemented. For example, it's great to be able to highlight a section of a track and change the pitch. Now I have to believe you can do that in CoolEdit 2000 but it's not obvious to me how.

As for installing Linux, you should have your mom check out recent versions of Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc., which come with slick, user-friendly installers that anyone can operate. Debian is more geared toward the hobbyist/techie/professional class of users.

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[dave420]

No, I think Linux needs to get its foundation in place before reaching for the stars. Cohesion is the first step... once all linux software looks and works in a similar manner, people will become accustomed to using "linux" as opposed to redhat/mandrake/whatever. Once that happens, more software will creep into the scene, pandering to the windows converts. That will lead to a larger take-up, which would means it was worthwhile for companies to make more software for linux. Once that happens, it's a chain-reaction.

For "linux on the desktop" to exist, linux has to be a useable, approachable OS. Not a recording studio ;)

Re:Linux On The Desktop

[osewa77]

Think of a program like this as a "recording studio on the desktop"

The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Audacity a lot to do "Out Of Phase Stereo" or OOPS to remove the "center" of a stereo recording.
Many songs put the vocalist at the center so this is a useful way to remove vocals from a song.
1) Load your favorite .MP3, .OGG, or .WAV song
2) one click to split into two tracks (left & right)
3) click on either left or right track, select "Invert" from the Effects menu...this is the key step.
4) click-select both tracks and select "Quick Mix"
5) you are left with a mono recording that has the former "center channel" (usually the vocals) removed!

This won't work on "live" concert recordings and works best with "Pop/Rock" from the 1960s & 1970s

Thomas Dz.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop him! He's trying to make more songs available for Karaoke!

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Flingles]

Hasn't worked for me yet on quite a few 60's 70's songs. I don't know if I'm doing it right...
I have no idea what you mean in step 2 but I click mix->split stereo track to select a single side. Well anyway no success yet...

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[millahtime]

I have tried this exactly as instructed and it didn't work. Not sure if it's missing a step or what but this doesn't work.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

No, after you load your song file, click on the little down arrow thing next to the waveform, not up on the menu....one of the options should be "split stereo track"
When you do that, Audacity will show you TWO waveforms now where you only previously had one. One is the waveform for the left channel and the other is for the right.
Now only select ONE of the left or right tracks and select Effect-->Invert
That will invert only one of the two channels.
Then do a Project-->Quick Mix to combine the one original (left or right) track and one inverted (left or right) track.

Thomas fping Dzubin

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Golantig]

It also removes the kick drum and anything else placed right in the centre. Good job...

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh crap, I left out a crucial step.
After step 2), but before step 3)
2a) you have to convert both channels to mono before you do the invert. You can do that with the little down-arrow icon next to each (left & right) waveform.

Thomas "fping" Dz.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh crap, I left out a crucial step.
After step 2), but before step 3)
2a) you have to convert both channels to mono before you do the invert. You can do that with the little down-arrow icon next to each (left & right) waveform.

Thomas "fping" Dz.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Captain Large Face]

O O O O O O O O O OO O O O O O O
Stop him! He's trying to make more songs available for Karaoke!

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[rokzy]

If you need help working out the kick drum for a song then you have other problems.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[mivok]

How about doing the reverse of this, and just leaving the center channel (removing the instruments)?

Then I could fake karaoke!

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[realnowhereman]

WHAT? Am I missing something - surely stereo is two mono channels to start with?

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Theodore Logan]

My kingdom for some mod points.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but to get the OOPS effect, you have to combine channels that Audacity "thinks" are mono channels, so that's why you need the extra step.
Otherwise you'll get a sort-of OOPS effect, but not really...the final mixdown MUST be mono and NOT stereo to get this effect.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Simonetta]

I have read of another step for removing the audio common to both channels of a stereo recording. This is to delay one of the channels between one and twenty milliseconds before mixing the out-of-phase channels.
This helps get rid of all the audio artifacts found when the two channels (one normal, the other inverted 180 degreees out of phase).
I saw a circuit about ten years ago in an electronics magazine that used a 'bucket-brigade' dual channel analog audio delay chip to delay one of the channels a few milliseconds before mixing.

My favorite example of this technique is from the Beatles Anthology Two album. The song "And Your Bird Can Sing" has all the giggling and buffoonery removed from beautiful pre-recorded track.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Anonymous Coward]

the Nullsoft DSP demo for WinAmp does the same thing for me with much less hassle. Tweak a few settings in WinAmp and everything you play is immediately played with just the 'stereo difference'. It's a great way to judge the quality of an mp3 too - poor encodes REALLY get shown up, good encodes sound fine. I find LAME at a fixed JS 160kbps reaches this quality most of the time.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[lawpoop]

Easy. Take your instrumental track, invert it, and then mix it with the song. Now all you have is the vocals.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[nicky_d]

Doing something fairly similar will get you the 'opposite' result and is often used to obtain 'acapella' tracks for use it mashups and bootlegs.

The ideal method is to find a CD that contains an instrumental version of the main track. This needs to be literally the same tracks with the lyrics removed, not an instrumental remix.

Open both tracks as wav/aiff files or whatever (something uncompressed) and make sure they both start at exactly the same point in the file (easily done with an app like Audacity).

Run a 'select all' on the instrumental version, invert it, and copy it.

Paste-mix it into the vocal version. The inverted instrumental backing will be removed from the mix, leaving only the vocals. Save this et voila (and no viola).

I've tied this once myself and it worked OK so long as it was precisely set up to begin with. Hip hop singles are a good place to find instrumenal tracks. You're going to have your work cut out getting that acapella vocal of Brothers in Arms or Centerfold. But please keep trying.

Of course you can download plenty of pre-made acapellas with a little Googling, and artists are starting to release acapella tracks in line with the "zeitgeist" (or slightly behind, to be accurate). But it's always good to know you can do something yourself, you know. Nice to know I can fend for myself when it comes to acapella tracks if the a-bomb drops.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Sarin]

It's harder though to get the "center channel" from any recording and filter the rest away.
Imagine you could rip some cool drums from a song or the vocals.

Well after I searched the internet a year ago it seemed this was impossible (you can do the math and find it out yourself).
However after searching more recent I found out that it's possible with Sonic Foundry or Sony Sound Forge!

process -> pan/expand -> select preset "[Sys] Normal mix of MS recording (mid = left, side = right)" and process mode "Mix Mid-Side (MS) recording to left and right channels"

I've come up with various results, usually reverb messes it up, but sometimes you get a clean drumfill or vocal. If you make music yourself it's handy to pull existing tracks apart and analyze them more careful.

I wonder how it works and if it could be incorporated in Audacity as well.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[etn991]

You are already maxed on mod points for that one, and I don't have any anyway. But I must say, and please excuse my language, but that was fucking funny!.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[extropy]

Yeah, I've done the same with mixed results. If your sources have any lossy compression on them you'll basically get (the vocals)-(music)+(compression artifacts due to the music and vocals). As for doing more literally the "opposite" of a vocal cut... I'm pretty sure its theoretically impossible. At least with stereo audio using simple methods. Maybe something with FFT would work. When you add the inverse of the left channel to the right channel, you end up with one channel that is R-L. So if you try to subtract that from the original channels you get 2 channels: R-(R-L) and L-(R-L), which comes out to -L and R-2L. Other combinations will have similar results... I think the root of the problem is that the vocal cut doesnt just give you the original audio minus the audio which exists simultaneously in both channels (a new stereo audio file), it essentially gives you what I just said, but merged into one channel. Maybe someone can give a more rigorous explanation?

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[oskillator]

Easy. Take your instrumental track, invert it, and then mix it with the song. Now all you have is the vocals.

I don't know if you're an audio engineer, so I don't know if that's a joke :) Either way, some people might take it seriously, and that method won't actually work.

The center cut algorithm takes two streams, L and R, and gives a single stream L-R. Note that this is a single stream, and also that R is inverted -- inversion doesn't change how you hear a stream, just how it interacts with other streams. Subtracting L-R from L will give you R, from R gives you 2R-L. Neither one of these gives you just the center channel.

As far as I know, there's no way to get just the center channel using simple arithmetic.

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[Skater]

I just want to say, as the person that posted the parent comment, I absolutely love your response. Thanks!

--RJ

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

[lawpoop]

IANAAE; that's an ill-informed theory, not a joke. But, if you have the mono-channel instrumental extraction of a stereo source (i.e. "the middle cut out"), then couldn't you invert it and mix it with a mono-channel version of the original stereo source and then lose what you heard in the extraction?

I did some experiments with the wave file sequencer Acid and found that I could easily extract loops I had mixed in with other loops. I could easily get back each original loop by adding the inverse -- in fact here's the whole experiment:

I had 3 samples: drums, synth, and vocals. I made a single wave file track that was 4 bars drums, 4 bars drums + synth, and 4 bars drums + synth + vocals. I took that track and mixed the inverted drum loop in and I got 4 bars silence, 4 bars synth, and then 4 bars synth + vocals. I assumed that I could then pull out the synth loop (since it was then alone), and invert it to extract the vocals. Then I thought that I didn't need any of the original samples; If I had only the song, I could start with a bar of drums, cut it just right, and invert it, and then pull every loop from the song.

So what's the difference between my experiment and mixing these stereo sources? I'm eager to know! :)

still lack vital ui feature?

[Anonymous Coward]

i remembered testing it and being really satisfied with its editing features. but, i had no index while playing a project, of where the sound-head was in the file. i am used to seeing a line that shows which audio data is played at the moment, yet audacity lacks that features? is this now available?

Re:still lack vital ui feature?

[Ben Hutchings]

While playing it shows a red triangle above the tracks and a vertical red line through all the tracks at the playing position. When you pause the line goes away but the triangle stays.

comparing the wrong things

[qortra]

Audacity is a fantasic wave editor, but it is neither a sampler (like the s900) nor a multitracker (like cubase) nor a proprietary hardware money-making machine (like protools). If you're looking for a computer based DAW, check out Ardour; it's quite nice, and its all graphical (so long as you have jack running somewhere).

Re:comparing the wrong things

[Anonymous Coward]

and i never got it to work as it should (tm), though i use linux since uhm 4 years.

Re:comparing the wrong things

[torpor]

Duh, Ardour isn't a sampler, either.

For that, though, you've got tons of options in Linux. Specimen, for example, is a great sampler for Linux. JACK-friendly too, which means you can run it alongside Ardour or Audacity or whatever, and away you go ...

Re:comparing the wrong things

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean you can't use it to take, say a 128 kbs mp3 and make it a 64?
Seems like you'd want that functionality in an audio program. If there are other free options to do this, why not add them to audacity?

Re:comparing the wrong things

[0x0d0a]

That's an extremely specialized function. It's something that a dedicated MP3 encoder might worry about, but most software (which just wants to shove a bunch of audio to an encoder) doesn't want to deal with.

Furthermore, I suspect that in most cases, this sort of thing would be best done in a non-interactive, batch-processing manner. Audacity is an interactive program.

If you make a small component, people are free to choose the best component of each type and let it do the job.

If you make a large set of integrated software, you have to take the package or leave the package as a whole. This has a habit of not leading to the greatest software.

Re:comparing the wrong things

[bach37]

Audacity is a fantasic wave editor, but it is neither a sampler (like the s900) nor a multitracker

Uh, yes it is indeed a multitracker.

Scott in NC

Re:comparing the wrong things

[Bootsy Collins]

and i never got it to work as it should (tm), though i use linux since uhm 4 years.

Really? I'm using it right now, and it works well for me. My only problem with it at this point is the extreme lack of documentation. I'm having to use the Pro Tools manual to figure out a lot of stuff about how Ardour works. But it's very nice.

Re:comparing the wrong things

[sharph]

It depends on your definition of multitrack.

Its not a audio sequencer like Ardour is. You can have multiple tracks, but only one sample, region--whatever you want to call it, per track.

It is enough to crossfade songs into eachother, to add voice overs, but not enough to make music, IMO.

No its not a sequencer, but you could argue about the multitrack part. It does a lot more than Soundforge does in terms of multitrack.

Oh, and Ardour can be COMPLETELY graphical if you use qjackctl. Makes configuring it a whole lot simpler too.

!Cool!

[tcdk]

And I was looking around for a new sound edit program. I've been using CoolEdit for a long time but Audacity seems to do everything I need.

Just took it for a spin and it looks good. It even have a noise reduction function...

Hey, just checked the undo feature and you can even undo the mp3 import.

The mp3 export function seems a bit lacking, but thats what programs like CDex is for (on windows).

Re:!Cool!

[carpe_noctem]

I use cooledit for most of my audio editing, and your post blows me away. My first thought using the program was "wow, they finally made it run on my mac. Badass!". However, my second thought was, "hrm, it's -like- cooledit, but without any of the effects or features".

This program looks like it's off to a good start, but it's not gonna replace cooledit for me. Namely, it lacks a lot of basic plugins (ADSR, amplification envelopes, fade ins/outs that don't suck, spectrum analysis, etc). Hopefully, the VST enabler project will take care of most of this.

Re:!Cool!

[einer]

No VST is a real killer. I was told that, even as flawed, ugly, hacked, and putrid as VST is, it's the only real name in the game right now. My DJ friends won't move to a platform without VST. No matter how enthused they are about free software or the ideas of open source, no matter how much the ideals of the open source community ring true to them, if it doesn't work, they're not going to switch.

Re:!Cool!

[tcdk]

I'm guess my needs are different/simpler than yours. Sorry, if I got your hopes up...

Re:!Cool!

[CoughDropAddict]

This program looks like it's off to a good start, but it's not gonna replace cooledit for me. Namely, it lacks a lot of basic plugins (ADSR, amplification envelopes, fade ins/outs that don't suck, spectrum analysis, etc). Hopefully, the VST enabler project will take care of most of this.

For spectrum analysis, go View->Plot Spectrum. There's also spectrum view mode, which you can select from any track's menu. Envelope editing is built in to the interface; just choose the envelope tool and start dragging points.

We definitely could use some more effects though. The most impressive ones right now are noise removal, and change pitch/tempo/speed.

Re:!Cool!

[bonch]

Which is silly, of course, since other formats like DXi in Windows also exist. As if a specific plug-in format, i.e. VST, is somehow superior to others. It's just a connection API. The audio quality isn't magically better or anything.

You're "DJ friends" can keep on using VST forever while everyone else moves on.

Re:!Cool!

[carpe_noctem]

Like many plugins for audacity, the tool exists, but it is either non-functional or useless. The main reason I use cooledit's frequency analysis is for resampling instrumunts, a task at which audacity cannot currently do.

Say you resample someone's bassline, and you want to use this sample within another program such as reason or buzz as a machine. So you grab your sample from a file, isolate it, etc. After clipping the wav, you're good to go.

However, when you take this note into reason, you can't just go off and start programming notes into it... even though reason will happily make a melody for you, the notes that you program into the machine are only relative to the sample that you give it. That is, they do not actually reflect the sample you put in.

For instance, say the bass note you grab is an F#. However, when you feed this into another machine, it will assume it is tuned to a C. So when you tell it to play something like "C, C#, D", you would actually be hearing "F# G G#". So, everything is off-tune and sounds like ass.

In cooledit (I'm on a mac atm, so sadly, I cannot tell you specifically where to find this tool), you can whip out ce's analysis program, which will tell you the exact tuning of a given sound. So, you can figure out that the note is actually an F# rather than a C, and either work around it in buzz or reason, or you could change the pitch of the sample to adjust it to a C. In case you're curious, audacity's analysis doesn't support this. It'll run a freq analysis, but not actually tell you anything useful out of it.

I only bring this lengthy example up because it is one of the things that really pisses me off about the open source community. It's as if everyone is really excited about this program just because it's finally -somewhat- useable, and it's OSS. It's kind of like praising the retarded kid in elementary school when he spells "dog" correctly in the spelling bee. =) My point is, I'm optimistic for audacity, but it lacks a lot of -basic- functionality for composing or editing music.

Re:!Cool!

[CoughDropAddict]

In cooledit (I'm on a mac atm, so sadly, I cannot tell you specifically where to find this tool), you can whip out ce's analysis program, which will tell you the exact tuning of a given sound. So, you can figure out that the note is actually an F# rather than a C, and either work around it in buzz or reason, or you could change the pitch of the sample to adjust it to a C. In case you're curious, audacity's analysis doesn't support this. It'll run a freq analysis, but not actually tell you anything useful out of it.

That's simply not true. Open View->Plot Spectrum. You will see the spectrum, and it should peak at the pitch of the fundamental note. Now move the cursor over that peak. Now you see a display of the form "Cursor: 3239 Hz (G#7) = -41 dB."

Of course Audacity doesn't have everything, and we would love to have time to develop more features. But at least give us credit for the features we do have.

Re:!Cool!

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

This program looks like it's off to a good start, but it's not gonna replace cooledit for me. Namely, it lacks a lot of basic plugins (ADSR, amplification envelopes, fade ins/outs that don't suck, spectrum analysis, etc). Hopefully, the VST enabler project will take care of most of this.

Audacity has built-in amplification envelopes with linear-dB interpolation - i.e. fades that don't suck. You can also use built-in or plug-in effects for other types of fades. It has lots of spectrum analysis, including a spectrogram display and a frequency plot window.

And Audacity does have VST support - but currently it's limited because the VST SDK does not let us distribute the source code to it, which means that we can't integrate it directly into Audacity. Right now quite a few VST effects plug-ins work, without their GUI, and hopefully soon we will have full VSTGUI support and support for more advanced VST plug-ins, too.

Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer

Re:!Cool!

[carpe_noctem]

That's simply not true. Open View->Plot Spectrum. You will see the spectrum, and it should peak at the pitch of the fundamental note. Now move the cursor over that peak. Now you see a display of the form "Cursor: 3239 Hz (G#7) = -41 dB."

Cool. So it does have this feature.

Interesting how half the time, it actually prints out "0" or "-1" instead of a note value (probably why I didn't see this before). Maybe I'm interpreting the data incorrectly.

Re:!Cool!

[BorgCopyeditor]

While you're right that there's no inherent benefit in quality, the issue is that _many_ more effects plug-ins are available as VSTs (and people forced to rely on DirectX complain about the lack of availability). Also, many people have a considerable investment in VST plug-ins, so they're understandably not too enthused about having to throw money away to move to a different platform.

Re:!Cool!

[Doug Coulter]

I wrote many of the efx for CoolEdit, and then wrote a book about it all, Digital Audio Processing. Nope, I didn't give the cooledit source code (Hey, they are my friends! And they paid me well!) but I did give Windows source to my own waveform editor -- and I put it squarely in public domain -- better than GPL depending on your belief system. If the Audacity guys want this, they have only to get the book, or contact me. Shouldn't be too hard to port to Linux, but I'm just learning it now, so it's hard to be sure. Doug

Re:!Cool!

[fucksl4shd0t]

While you're right that there's no inherent benefit in quality, the issue is that _many_ more effects plug-ins are available as VSTs (and people forced to rely on DirectX complain about the lack of availability). Also, many people have a considerable investment in VST plug-ins, so they're understandably not too enthused about having to throw money away to move to a different platform.

Hmm, Audacity does LADSPA on all three platforms. Of course, there aren't any LADSPA plugins that run in Windows right now, don't know about Mac. ;) In any case, there's so many LADSPA plugins it's unreal. Check out Steve Harris's library (I forget the URL, google for Steve harris ladspa and you'll fint it) and CMT. LADPSA.org has a page with links to known plugins, and there's tons more besides that.

Personally, Audacity's last in my chain of programs. Everything I do starts with ecasound and works its way through to Audacity, where I do the final mix-down. Multi-track is nice, but my computer is such a slow ass that I'd rather do my recording from the command line. :) Let's see a Windows app beat that....

Re:!Cool!

[fucksl4shd0t]

Hmm, you're a musician and you can't tell the difference between an F# and a C? ;) You must be one of those new-fangled alternative rockers...

Re:!Cool!

[carpe_noctem]

Yeah, my musical ear sucks. ;]

But yes, we are actually a noisecore band, if you must know.

Rock on Linux!!!

[torpor]

There's some great audio stuff happening in linux land lately. I'll give you the two examples I've been playing with today alone, for example:

GALAN - Graphical Audio Language

and

Specimen, MIDI sampler for Linux

These two apps alone prove that Linux is as ready for Audio applications development as any other, and Audacity proves that its possible to do it in a way that caters to -all- platforms.

Gonna be an interesting year for Audio apps in Linux land this year, I think ... Very interesting.

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[LizardKing]

Another "killer app" is Rosegarden, which is rapidly becoming a suitable replacement for Steinberg Cubase. The Hydrogen sample based drum machine is also worth a mention. The exciting thing is that JACK allows easy multiplexing of things like Rosegarden and Hydrogen, and has kickstarted a whole load of audio and MIDI projects.

My only regret is that my preferred operating system lacks an ALSA compatability layer, so things like JACK and Rosegarden are Linux only at the moment.

Chris

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[JayJay.br]

And don't forget Ardour, an excellent project for a Linux DAW. They're releasing new betas every other week and coming close to the 1.0 release. A great substitute for Cakewalk/Sonar.

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[WWWWolf]

The others are flinging around other cool Linux audio apps, allow me to mention one more.

GNU Lilypond, simply the sweetest music typesetting package ever made. It is very very amazing.

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[Phil John]

Another "killer app" is Rosegarden, which is rapidly becoming a suitable replacement for Steinberg Cubase

Not wanting to ruffle anyones feathers here but it is in no way even close to being a replacement for Cubase. As someone who uses Cubase every single day I am speaking from experience.

I tried Rosegarden but it just dusn't have the polish that audio professionals expect in this day and age. It's more on a par with some very early versions of Cubase 3, if even that. Yes, ok, it has VST plugin support but it's nowhere near as seamless and intuitive as cubase, the performance is lacking and it just doesn't feel like a professional app.

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[PyromanFO]

What part of "rapidly becoming suitable" didn't you read? :)

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[nicky_d]

Well, he said "no way even close", which suggests he doesn't agree with the "rapidly becoming suitable" part. :)

The danger being, I guess, that someone hears Rosegarden is "rapidly becoming suitable", tries it, decides it's "no way even close" and never comes back.

It's great to have projects like Rosegarden (I havn't tried it for a while but it was shaping up impressively a while back when I did), but it's not going to become a viable alternative to Cubase for pro users. What it hopefully *will* be is an excellent app for 'everyone' to use, without barriers of price, proprietary features, and usability. If it can make an impact on those people who grab warez copies of Cubase for personal music making, or have to make do with scaled-down 'lite' copies of music apps for budgetary reasons, fantastic. Here's something that can do what that 600 music suite does, it won't cost you a penny, and it runs on Linux. That would be a fantastic achievement, and to me it would be closer to my vision of what Linux and OSS are all about than seeing it replace a pro tool in the studio. There for all , free for all, and Free for all.

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[LizardKing]

This is not a troll, but does Cubase actually stay up for any decent length of time these days? I gave up on it about three years ago, because I was always saving after anything more than the most trivial change to a composition. It became a reflex action - "modify, save, modify, save".

Because so many people pirate Cubase, and it is in a niche market, I eventually came to the conclusion that Steinberg were constantly adding new features to Cubase in order to charge for upgrades and ensure a steady income. The net result is a very buggy, over featured piece of software. That's why Rosegarden appeals to me so much, as its developers are driven by the need to make something that works reliably not ensure a revenue stream.

Chris

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[black mariah]

Except that unless you're lucky enough to fall ass-backwards into getting Jack to work right for once, it's completely useless.

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[sharph]

Check out SSM, its way better than gAlan.

Audio samples at unit-e.sharph.net.

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[torpor]

cool, thanks for the recommendation ... downloading the unit-e albums now!

(can't find SSM, though i'll do a more extensive search when i get to work...)

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

[sharph]

http://www.pawfal.org/Software/SSM/

Sweet!!!

[Bill Kendrick]

As a game developer, I need tools like Audacity to make and tweak the lame little sfx in my games. ;)
Congrats guys and gals!!!

maybe...

[beware1000]

wow! maybe Australian local television networks can actually afford to make their advertisments sound decent now!

Mass converters?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would like to know: does anyone know if there are (free) mass-converter progs on the Net?

Like, if you have a directory full of mp3's, it auto-convert them all into say, ogg's?

(And idem with pics; gif-files to open-formats?)

Re:Mass converters?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, try "bash", it lets you do all sorts of stuff like that.

Re:Mass converters?

[erik_fredricks]

That process is known as transcoding, and it's a bad idea.

This'll come up as more and more people switch from mp3 to Ogg. The plain fact is, mp3 and ogg use different compression algorithms, both of which are lossy. If you've converted a file to mp3, then you've lost some information. Transcoding it over to Ogg will cause loss of even more information. It will always sound worse.

Unfortunately, the only real solution is to reconvert from the original source material.

Re:Mass converters?

[tehdaemon]

Ummmm, have you tried it? I know the theory, but I tried it just for fun. as long as the ogg was the same bitrate as the mp3, I could not tell the difference. Maby I'll do just that again, and then import both into audacity and do a diff to see what if any real difference there is.

Re:Mass converters?

[tehdaemon]

Replying to myself, I did it.
In audacity the waveform looks like a flat line. Just a little bit thicker than silence. Playing it sounds something like wind going through trees. Lots of scratchy stuff.

I also comapred the original wave file to the mp3. The difference between the origonal wave and the mp3 is at least an order of magnitude (10x) larger than the difference between the mp3 and the transcoded ogg. For example, I amplified the original wave as far as you could without clipping before this test. I could have amplified the diff of the mp3 and ogg by 24.0 db without clipping.

commands used: lame --abr 128 file.wav
oggenc -b 128 -q 10 file2.wav (full quality)
file2.wav was exported from audacity using the imported mp3.

My conclusion, If you can't tell the difference between the original wav and the mp3, there is no way you will ever tell the difference between an mp3 and the ogg made from it, even using better speakers/amp etc, as long as the bitrates are the same. This was not an exhustive test, different songs/frequencies may be different YMMV, but I would not be afraid to transcode my stuff.

Most important questions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it support recording to hdd and does it declick recordings from phono?

Re:Most important questions...

[Handpaper]

Yes, you can use it as a sound recorder
No, it doesn't have an automatic declick function - and declicking manually is no fun.

this is good for OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP 2(third release) - 2D almost ready to topple paintshoppro and then on to the long road to victory over photoshop http://www.gimp.org/

SODIPODI - vector 2D maturing nicely http://www.sodipodi.com/

Blender 2.32- 3D models already quite powerful http://www.blender3d.com/

Audacity 1.2.0 - very nice http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Now all we need is some developers to get into gear helping out with Jahshaka so that it can compete on that "entry level" ticket that will allow it to really take off. But until that time, it hasn't got what it takes. Linux needs a non-linear editor pretty bad these days, so come help out.
http://www.jahshaka.com/

And then maybe an OSS game engine that can keep improving. Many games these days come from the brains of a few mod creators (counter-strike, day of defeat, natural selection) and as proven by counter-strike it isn't graphics, but gameplay (and in the case of single-player, storyline) which matter most. So a good engine that accepts and interfaces well with blender would make OSS quite simply rule.

We have won (there is never total victory) the server market, and the corporate desktop (mozilla+openoffice) is about to crumble - now onto the home desktop! Freesoftware and beyond!

Re:this is good for OSS

[torpor]

And then maybe an OSS game engine that can keep improving

Whats wrong with the Blender game engine? Honest question, I don't actually know much about it (I'm an audio hacker, not a graphics hacker) but I seem to remember there being much hooplah being made about Blenders' gaming capabilities.

Is this engine not good enough for 3D games on Linux, or has it just not received enough attention?

Re:this is good for OSS

[lazy_arabica]

Well, just had a look at the "new" audacity. I don't find it so innovative ; indeed, I was expecting for many features which were not included here. Some are pretty simple ; for example, I would like the FFT filter to have a "log scale" option, which would make it much more interesting and usable.
Anyway, Audacity is an interesting project. I will keep suggesting it to people wanting a simple and quite powerful audio editor on Linux. But the time we get something like Protools or Adube Audition seems quite far, far away...

Re:this is good for OSS

[Chris_Jefferson]

And in this you see one of the major problems I feel open source has today.

None of the programs you describe are trying to do something new and imaginative, their aim is simply to clone someone else as efficently as possible.

We need more OSS apps which aim to be good in their own right, not simply because they are "a free replacement for X".

Re:this is good for OSS

[Quarters]

GIMP 2(third release) - 2D almost ready to topple paintshoppro and then on to the long road to victory over photoshop http://www.gimp.org/

Hyperbole like this only helps to underscore either a)the closed mindedness of OSS developers or b)the ignorance of the person who said it.

Software development is not a war or a contest. A rival piece of software rarely (EXTREMELY RARELY) ever obliterates the market for its competitors. Most of the time, though, the decline/loss of a viable program is due to the developer being lost in a merger or acquisition or by the advertising money spent by a rival to achieve massive market penetration. Mergers, buyouts, and marketing blitzes aren't something for which most OSS projects have the $, time, or inclination.

The GIMP is not going to "topple" PaintShop Pro. Most people aren't OSS savvy but they can buy PSPro off of the shelf at BestBuy--so they'll get what they can acquire. If GIMP shows any detectable difference to Photoshop it will probably only be in the lessening of Photoshop piracy since there is an adequate free tool some people to use. Even then, though, the warez-monkeys will still download Photoshop because it's available to them.

Re:this is good for OSS

[Mr_Silver]

Now all we need is some developers to get into gear helping out with Jahshaka so that it can compete on that "entry level" ticket that will allow it to really take off.

Actually all we need is some developers to get into gear working on an Exchange and Outlook replacement.

As soon as you have that, then you'll find that corporates will find it easier to move away from Windows and that the Joe User will pick Linux for his home computer because thats what he uses at work.

Re:this is good for OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Even then, though, the warez-monkeys will still download Photoshop because it's available to them.

Photoshop is already a free legal download. When the trial ends, clean up the registry and reinstall. People do that with Winzip. I don't hear the Winzip folks complaining about it.

Re:this is good for OSS

[arkanes]

The best and most common use of a computer is to make existing tasks easier. This naturally precludes , in the general case, "innovation". There's nothing that Excel (or any spreadsheet program) does that people didn't do before with (lots of) pen and ink.

Now, in most cases, OSS projects aren't conciously attempting to re-create an existing product - but they're attempting to solve a certain set of problems, and where theres a particular app or set of apps that dominate that space they will inevitably be compared to that product. Photoshop is successfull because it accurately addresses the needs of graphics professionals. Anything else that accurately addresses those needs will neccesarily be very similiar to Photoshop, and anything that doesn't will be derided as "not suitable for professionals", and rightly so.

Re:this is good for OSS

[afidel]

Most of the GNU toolset started out as Free replacements for standard UNIX tools. Now most sane admin's chuck the toolchain on UNIX distro's and use the GNU tools. It might take time but if there's an itch to be scratched OSS is often the way to go for a good product long term.

Re:this is good for OSS

[110010001000]

Yes! Lets put all of those commercial software companies out of business! That will teach all those greedy programmers a lesson! Don't they know they should be working for free?

Re:this is good for OSS

[Chris_Jefferson]

True, but this encourages the (I'm not convinced entirely untrue idea) that the purpose of open source is simply to create free versions of applications that people have spent large amounts of money researching and developing.

As I'm sure you know, it is a thousand times harder to create an application from scratch than to make a functional copy of an existing one (note here I'm not talking about exactly copying, as say WINE is aiming to do. Thats another aim entirely and can actually as they are finding out be much, much harder than just writing a new system)

Re:this is good for OSS

[KrisW]

It's not all as simple as that. I think that if small groups of people working in their spare time can write something that competes with commercial software, that just goes to show how much we're being over-charged for software. $700 or whatever for Photoshop? C'mon....

Re:this is good for OSS

[FooBarWidget]

"GIMP 2(third release) - 2D almost ready to topple paintshoppro"

To me, Gimp has already far surpassed Paint Shop Pro a looong time ago. Gimp is nicer, faster and more powerful than Paint Shop Pro (except simple vectors but I really don't need that).

Re:this is good for OSS

[Warped1]

The blender game engine has been out-of-sync with current blender development for a very long time now ... meaning you have to use an old build of blender which is missing quite a lot of the new features you'll see in 2.32 (new ui, some raytracing, yafray, etc. etc. etc. ... 2.3x is a wicked series).

They were waiting for a new version of SOLID to be released for the physics side of things and based on the forum @ blender.org, it seems like the game engine might finally be buildable from CVS again - but very buggy.

At any rate, if you're looking for a good 3d engine, checkout OGRE. If you need everything, including the kitchen sink, then look at Crystal Space 3D.

Re:this is good for OSS

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Well, just had a look at the "new" audacity. I don't find it so innovative ; indeed, I was expecting for many features which were not included here. Some are pretty simple ; for example, I would like the FFT filter to have a "log scale" option, which would make it much more interesting and usable.

This is available with the Equalizer effect. I agree, it's a little confusing. These effects will be merged in a future version.

Please add your other ideas to the Audacity Feature Requests page!

Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer

Re:this is good for OSS

[dave420]

I'm all for linux taking over the world, but let's be reasonable about this. If we over-inflate how good linux software is, people will contribute to it less.

GIMP 2 will never oust Photoshop. Have you seen photoshop 7 lately? No other commercial software comes close, let alone OSS...

SODIPODI while functional, has an interface that looks like a car crash, and is nowhere near as intuitive as anything from Adobe

Blender 2.32 errr 3D studio max, anyone? poser? Blender has its work cut out competing.

Audacity 1.2.0 Step in the right direction, but Cool Edit and the myriad other sound apps on other platforms mostly exceed its spec and performance, unfortunately.

It's coming round - the gap between commercial, established software and OSS is closing, but it's not even close yet. A few more years, and things will get closer.

Re:this is good for OSS

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

And in this you see one of the major problems I feel open source has today.

None of the programs you describe are trying to do something new and imaginative, their aim is simply to clone someone else as efficently as possible.

That's not entirely true. OpenOffice is a good example of this; it clones Microsoft Office way too much in my opinion. Yes, there are differences, and some more substantial ones in 1.1, but it's still very much a clone. Then again, that's probably the only way to get lots of people to switch away from Microsoft Office.

The Gimp is not a clone of Photoshop. Obviously it's not as powerful, but for non-professional users, it's just different. Does certain things in a different way. Sometimes easier - for example I think it's easier to work with transparency in the Gimp.

Audacity is not a clone of any audio editor. It has some superficial similarities to some other programs, but that's only because they have some similar capabilities. Audacity was designed from the beginning to be as intuitive and easy-to-use as possible, while making as many professional capabilities available as possible.

We need more OSS apps which aim to be good in their own right, not simply because they are "a free replacement for X".

That sounds good in theory, but it seems like more than half of the posts in this article are saying "Audacity is good, but it will never replace audio editor X until it has feature Y". And in half of the cases, Audacity already does have feature Y - it just implements it in a different way.

Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer

Re:this is good for OSS

[lazy_arabica]

I'm likely to do so ;-)

Re:this is good for OSS

[110010001000]

The advent of "just good enough" OSS software does incalcuable damage to the commercial software industry. Professional programmers who use or contribute to OSS are committing professional suicide and limiting the opportunities of future programmers.

I am glad I already made my money in the software biz. It is going to start to get ugly in that field, if it hasn't already.

Re:this is good for OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

The advent of "just good enough" OSS software does incalcuable damage to the commercial software industry.

And incalculable benefit for everyone in society just looking for good enough software.

Re:this is good for OSS

[110010001000]

Yes, everyone loves "free" (as in beer). Not good for the industry though.

I would like free dental and medical care as well. A free car would be great. A free house. Its funny no one offers these things.

Re:this is good for OSS

[fucksl4shd0t]

That sounds good in theory, but it seems like more than half of the posts in this article are saying "Audacity is good, but it will never replace audio editor X until it has feature Y". And in half of the cases, Audacity already does have feature Y - it just implements it in a different way.

We see that all the time. While you're right that AUdacity winds up having it if people just ask, it really irks me that people keep chanting "Not good enough until it does *insert crap*". Not good enough for what? Not good enough to save your worthless ass from tyranny? (NOt you specifically, Dominic, of course)

I sure in the hell don't recall ever reading about any Pilgrim saying "The NEw World isn't good enough until they have toilets" or some crap like that. Freedom is worth making sacrifices over. Hell, 10 years ago "Feature Y" didn't exist in any application.

Anyway, good work and so forth. ;)

Re:this is good for OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even funnier that you don't recognize the difference between things like dental care, medical care, cars, houses ... and software.

Re:this is good for OSS

[MrResistor]

And in this you see one of the major problems I feel open source has today.

None of the programs you describe are trying to do something new and imaginative, their aim is simply to clone someone else as efficently as possible.

If this is in fact a problem, and I'm not convinced it is, then it is certainly not restricted to OSS. How many proprietary apps can you name that are actually innovative?

We need more OSS apps which aim to be good in their own right, not simply because they are "a free replacement for X".

MS Word was a cheap replacement for WordPerfect. IE was a cheap replacement for Netscape. That's the way the software world works. To think that it should be magically different for OSS is just stupid.

As for the "need" to be innovative, I think in most areas that's a marketeer's delusion. The majority of people never do much more with their computers than what's provided by Windows plus MS Office, and even then they probably only use a tenth of the capabilities. "Innovative" implies that you're doing something new and different, when what most of us want is to do the same things we're doing now, only cheaper.

In many cases innovation can actually be harmful. Blender is a great example of this, with its innovative interface. Those who take the time to learn find it's much better than the industry standard apps, but most people who are into that sort of thing have already learned the other ones, and hate Blender because of its interface.

I'm not saying there aren't areas where innovation is important, I work in an industry where people are constantly finding innovative things to do with computers (video production equipment, if it matters). By and large, it isn't important in many of the areas where OSS most often gets hammered for this.

Mandrake package available

[G�tz]

I've uploaded the Mandrake package of audacity 1.2.0 to the contribs, it's available from any cooker mirror.

If you have Mandrake 9.2, it should be possible to install it there as well.

Toolbar

[Anonymous Coward]

Audacity + MSN Toolbar = best new software on Win32.

Re:Toolbar

[Anonymous Coward]

On Windows XP, the MSN toolbar looks like crap. It doesn't use the XP theme. Instead it has a blocky Win9x interface. Google's is much better. I'm not sure why MS doesn't use the proper styles. MSDN is full of articles where they advocate developers to adopt the XP theme.

Plugins

[FrostedWheat]

Still no support for plugins on Linux. What's with that?

Re:Plugins

[WWWWolf]

One of the advantages of 1.2 over 1.0 is that it finally supports LADSPA plugins.

I can recommend the freely-available plugin packs, such as Computer Music Toolkit (It has Dynamic Sledgehammer, what the hell else you need? =) and Steve Harris' Plugins (Likewise one can't live without Barry's Satan Maximizer =)

In Debian, just try apt-get install blop cmt tap-plugins swh-plugins and blammo, you have tons of cool plugins that work out of box in Ardour, Audacity and Sweep...

Re:Plugins

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Still no support for plugins on Linux. What's with that?

We can't include support for VST plug-ins directly, because the VST SDK doesn't let you redistribute the source code.

However, Audacity does support LADSPA plug-ins on all platforms. On the Mac and Windows we provide a VST Enabler (a LADSPA/VST bridge) and on Linux there is at least one project that enables you to access VST plug-ins through LADSPA.

I think we agree

[qortra]

I never claimed that Ardour was a sampler; just that it was a DAW (digital audio workstation).

That being said, thank you for the link. Another up-and-coming project to watch is the Linux Sampler Project. They don't seem to have any major releases yet, but it looks promising (also built on Jack).

Re:I think we agree

[torpor]

We do agree: Ardour rocks.

But it just sounded like the way you were framing it, it was an answer to the problem of Audacity not being a sampler, nor a DAW.

Regardless though, the division between DAW and Audio Sample Editor is a good one - I think its good to have smaller, lighter tools for things like editing ... and that said, I know that you can integrate Audacity with Ardour if you prefer to use it for your edits, which is a really nice capability.

Linux Audio apps may not have the ProTools, or the Cubases, but hell. There is some *freakin'* nice audio hacking going on in Linux land...

A question for Audacity users..

[Mr Smidge]

Perhaps I can take advantage of this discussion to ask a quick question..

How might I record from the line in port of my sound card? I generally record vinyls that I own to a digital format to listen to more conveniently, and audacity's GUI option dialog only allows me to record from /dev/dsp, which records everything, i.e. "What U Hear".

I tried changing it to /dev/mixer in the config file, but the effect was the same.

This is annoying, if I'm recording and GAIM happens to make a noise, or something else does. I know I could just kill every other sound-producing process, but I'd rather work out how to record directly from line-in.

Any clues? Thank you, knowledgeable /. crowd.

Before you ask, I have STFW somewhat on this..

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[Skater]

Side question: are you recording straight from the turntable or going through an amp first?

If straight from the turntable, how are you correcting the sound? Does Audacity have that option? (I have it installed but haven't look for that feature.) That'd be cool if it did.

--RJ

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[imroy]

It sounds like a fairly simple issue. Just get into a mixer program and set it to "record" or "capture" from line instead of mix/master or whatever it's currently using. If you're using ALSA then I'd recommend gamix. Sorry I can't recommend what to use with the older OSS drivers, I've been using ALSA for so many years. On my SB! Live!! gamix has a seperate "capture" section where I can select from quite a few sources. Console mixers like alsamixer or aumix (which uses OSS not ALSA) just show the capture source as some button or option next to each slider.

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[Anonymous Coward]

If straight from the turntable, how are you correcting the sound?

I don't think there is any way to make connecting a turntable to a PC soundcard to work properly, because the power level from the pick-up is much lower than in the line or mic inputs that soundcards have. The recording, if any, would be noisy. You simply need a pre-amp. Which is easy to get: most any old stereo system that has a phono input and a line-level output (originally there for recording radio or vinyl records to tape, so it usually is labeled "tape") will work.

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[zero0w]

If you compile audacity for oss you can select Line In or Mic In, which should not be affected by audio of other programs when recording.

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[Skater]

Yeah, I have one with phono inputs, not that I have a turntable. I was just wondering whether the filtering that the pre-amp does could be done in software, thereby removing one link of the chain, possibly improving quality (or at least keeping degradation minimized). Then again, these are albums we're talking about, so degradation is a fact of life...

Thanks.
--RJ

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[Mr Smidge]

I'm using ALSA with a 2.6 kernel, and have got 'Capture' selected next to the Line source in alsamixer/gnome-alsamixer. Despite this, recording always seems to take place from the master mix.

Also happens when using arecord.

I'm using an SB Audigy, and there aren't many options I can try in terms of mixer settings, but I'll have an extra play around just in case I hit on something. I'll post a solution if I find one..

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[Mr Smidge]

I'm recording from the master output of my mixer, which does the phono preamplification itself (a Numark Matrix 3, if you're interested).

Since preamplification isn't a particularly complex thing to do, I'd suspect that if there was actually any demand for it then there would be a hardware circuit on sound cards to do just that from, say, a line in source.

However, yes it is cool, and I'm sure it could be implemented in software. I think it involves cutting the treble by 20dB, and boosting bass by 40dB, but that's only a rough guess and depends on other things (MM or MC, for instance).

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[TheLink]

Figure a way to mute line-in and/or mike channels on your playback volume control.

I dunno about Linux and your hardware but on Windows and at least two machines I know, you go to volume control- control for playback (NOT recording), and _mute_ the line-in.

Then go to control for recording and select the line-in.

Explanation: the playback volume control controls the output to various stuff, and for many sound hardware, the playback can also go to the line-in - which is useful sometimes, but if you don't want what you play being fed back to the line-in, mute it.

There could be a way to do this on Linux.

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you try kmix ? It might help.

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[Mr Smidge]

A good suggestion, but unfortunately it has no effect other than no longer letting me hear what I'm recording as it plays..

Testing with arecord, it still records sound from the master mix.

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[TheLink]

Just to make it clear:
Mute the PLAYBACK/OUTPUT to line-in NOT the main output/volume.

Set the RECORD/INPUT to line-in to the levels you want. This is a different thing from the above.

For some sound systems, there's a control for the sound output to line-in - mute that.

It may well be that there's no way to do it on your system (Linux + your hardware), but I think it's worth a shot to investigate further.

Re:A question for Audacity users..

[Mr Smidge]

You may be onto something here..

Recording from line in sounds like everything being recorded.. If I delibarately set the capture device to the master output, then the recording sounds phase-shifted..

I'll persevere, but many thanks for your help.

Good point!

[haggar]

For me, Audacity 1.0 is just fine for what I do - digitizing tapes and records, simple home-studio recordings. What I always missed:
-fade in and out tools
-what you said
-and to be able to chose the soundcard, if you have more than 1 installed

Re:Good point!

[haluness]

Hi, I'm trying to convert some old tapes to wav (and then later ogg). I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know how I could use audacity to do this - getting sound in from a stereo and then improving quality such as getting rid of hiss etc.
I'v only played with some demos in a old version of audactiy so I'm pretty much a newbie to sounds recording.

If you have any hints/tips could you mail me at rajarshi@presidency.com?
Thanks

Re:Good point!

[haggar]

There isn't much to it, really. You need to connect the tape out (or "Play") lines to your soundcard's line-in plug, with a cable like this
(sometimes it's called RCA-to-stereo plug, Y cable etc.)

In windows, using "Volume Control" (find it in the right bottom corner in the tray) make sure you set the line-in as the device from which you record.

I dunno about removing hiss. Maybe the new audacity can do that.

Re:Good point!

[haluness]

thanks

Re:Good point!

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

For me, Audacity 1.0 is just fine for what I do - digitizing tapes and records, simple home-studio recordings. What I always missed:
-fade in and out tools

Either use fade in/out effects or plug-ins, or use the built-in amplitude envelope editor - just click on the tool that looks like two triangles surrounding a control point.

-what you said

Audacity 1.2 displays the line showing the current playback/recording position

-and to be able to chose the soundcard, if you have more than 1 installed

That's always been there, in the preferences dialog.

Re:Good point!

[seanmeister]

I've used Audacity in the past to clean up the audio in an MPEG video converted from VHS. It worked very well.

I don't have Audacity installed right now, so I can't tell you exactly how I did it, but it was easy to figure out.

Re:Good point!

[tehdaemon]

1.2-pre-1 at least, has a remove noise effect. It looks like it is for removing hiss and similar noise.

Re:Good point!

[BlitzPig_Sal]

Audacity comes with a noise removal plugin that can be quite effective in some cases. You need to sample a bit of the tape that contains only the noise first. I've used it on voice-only recordings with amazing results.

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[tuxnduke]

Now you've seem to have received attension.. can't open screenshots-- slashdotted already? Happy now :)

Debian Woody packages?

[Bill Kendrick]

I was so excited when I saw "Debian" listed on the download page, til I discovered it was about some _POTATO_ packages! :^(

I tried replacing "potato" with "woody" in the apt source URL, but to no avail. :^( Anyone built Audacity 1.2.0 for Woody yet? C'mon! Backports! Backports! I LIVE off 'em! ;^)

-bill!
(yes, yes, I know about apt-pinning :^P )

Re:Debian Woody packages?

[GuyWithLag]

At the time of writing, Audacity 1.1.99pre3 is in Debian sid(unstable).

Re:Debian Woody packages?

[nutznboltz]

Knoppix too.

Re:Plugins are working fine in Linux, with LAPSDA

[zero0w]

Plugins are working fine in Linux, if you got LADSPA installed. I got my mandrake rpm here and there are many built-in plugins which are not found in the Windows version:

http://rpm.nyvalls.se/sound9.2.html

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[Deusy]

Audacity is a great application, but do we need announcements on /.? ...part of it is envy. I contribute to a number of projects (beginplug) including kino...

Bzzzzzzzzt... wrong answer. Slashdot does not announce KDE software kos apparently it's krap. Viva la Free Software!

Praise the Audacity team!

[Qbertino]

For suckage-free OSS audio editing!
Audio Editors don't get much attention. But when you need one it's so important to have one that does the basic stuff without a hinch and doesn't suck like the usual non-mainstream experimental OSS stuff that to often doesn't/didn't work as their teams like(d) to advertise.
Audacity was the first one to work as advertised for me. It's one I gladly take to replace the usual suspects like cool edit. It was the first usable audio editor under Linux aswell.
Thanks to the Audacity team for building this brick in the OSS builing and making it a good and reliable one. You rock!
I could only wish for that any project or contribution to OSS I produce will be of equal significance.

Had to be said.

incredibly useful

[breakinbearx]

This software is a must for ANYBODY who has recording and editing needs, especially if they need it on the cheap. My neighbors and i have a band, which has been just playing around for a year. Being just a lowly garage band, we have no cash for studio time. However, Audacity, a sound card, and a mic have allowed us to record a semi-decent demo! I've even experimented with some friends' tools i.e. ProTools and Acid, and i still haven't found something as productive and useful as this. I'm so glad to hear this is still progressing well and that there is this large of a support base for it.

Good, but not good enough

[djtrialprice]

I know that it depends on what you want to use it for, but I don't think Audacity is actually useful for "live recording" i.e. listening to something and concurrently recording alongside it.

I do have to admit that it is a great piece of software with loads of features but when I do some multitrack recording with my full duplex, 24-bit, DMX 6Fire soundcard: I expect good results. I don't expect a latency of about half a second. That's the bottom line - until that problem is addressed I can't swap Audacity for CoolEdit Pro, or Cakewalk. As a user and supporter of GPL stuff, that's what I really want to do.

I guess sometimes there really is a reason why software *can* rightly cost hundreds of thousands of $$$s.

Re:Good, but not good enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Donate Time
Donate Money

Re:Good, but not good enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Your latency issues may be entirely unrelated to Audacity. Playback on linux often suffers from latency because of sound servers. Are you using artsd or esd? If so, you'd likely get much lower latency with ALSA directly, or JACK. JACK is a bit more of a pain to set up, but offers exceptional latency (10ms or less, normally).

Re:Good, but not good enough

[jkantola]

I personally pipe my guitar from the POD to a laptop with Audacity to a home stereo/PA. Very nice, I always get my playing recorded, and with Audacity's very efficient handling of large files it's easy to pick out the good bits.

You should check out Ardour for a more professional, multi-track recording environment. It shouldn't have any serious latency issues, at least given that you run a low-latency kernel. It's still under (active) developement but it works quite well already.

Re:Good, but not good enough

[Nadir]

What you really want then is not Audacity, but Ardour together with Jack and an ALSA-supported soundcard

Re:Good, but not good enough

[djtrialprice]

I'm using windoze for the music recording. I've tried using many different configurations but none were succesful.
You've got me thinking though. I've definately take up your suggestion and try some recording in Linux with JACK or ALSA.
Cheers

Re:Good, but not good enough

[CoughDropAddict]

Have you tried 1.2? The audio i/o layer was completely rewritten to use a real-time threading model. You certainly shouldn't be getting latencies of half a second.

(I did a lot of the real-time audio work)

Re:Good, but not good enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got just the thing for you here.

Re:Good, but not good enough

[bcrowell]

That's the bottom line - until that problem is addressed I can't swap Audacity for CoolEdit Pro, or Cakewalk.
I bought Cakewalk, and it was the biggest piece of **** ever. Crashed all the time, and was full of bugs. My first tech support e-mail got an answer, but starting with my second one (is there any way to work around the crashes that happen every time I use a filter?) they started ignoring me.

I'm not saying open-source software is always perfect, but to me, Cakewalk was a perfect poster child for the worst evils of proprietary software: you pay money for something, you find out it doesn't work right, and then they expect you to pay for an upgrade to the next version, which might -- or might not -- fix the bugs.

It's true that Audacity is lacking some features that you'd want if you were doing some serious multitrack recording, but I'm really impressed with how it's coming along. Even before 1.2.0 (which I haven't tried yet), they'd cured every bug I'd experienced. It's also really impressive that it's cross-platform -- cross-platform apps are extremely difficult to maintain and work on.

Re:Good, but not good enough

[djtrialprice]

I can't remember which version I used but it was new about 4 months ago. As I said in another reply, I'll give it another go.
I do feel kind of bad for bitchin' about Audacity since out of *all* the audio apps I've used it is by far the most intuitive and easy to use.

The state of Linux content production software

[0x0d0a]

It's not all rosy:
Smurf, the Linux soundfont editor/creator, seems to have fallen behind the times, and hasn't been updated to GTK2.

XMMS, the Linux WinAMP clone, seems to be primarily static -- I don't see a lot of development on it these days.

Sound servers are still par for the course -- current sound driver systems like OSS and ALSA cannot fall back to software mixing when all hardware channels have been exhausted. Frequently, general audio use is through asound or aRts, which add latency and make it easier for audio to stutter.

On the up side, the 2.6 kernel brings everyone the low-latency and preempt patches, nice for pro audio work. ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, a new set of sound drivers) is standard in 2.6, and the aging OSS/Free is finally deprecated as the official Linux sound API. Hardware mixing, wavetable sample loading, and other things not in OSS/Free are now generally available. JACK, the Linux pro audio server, is mature and being used in a ton of projects.

PlanetCCRMA, an *excellent* source of packaged software for anyone using a Red Hat distro and interested in audio work, has been maintained and has become a good resource.

The Rosegarden MIDI sequencer is now a complete, pro-class set of composition software.

The main content creation areas:

* Page Layout - Scribus is supposed to fill this gap. I really have no idea how it compares to current pro-class page layout software.

* 3D Modeling - I'm personally not a huge Blender fan (not really comfortable with the interface), but it apparently does a good job. I was always kind of sad that front ends for POVRay never really took off, as that's a renderer with a lot of hours put into it. Not sure what the state of CAD is.

* Vector graphics: Sodipodi is slowly getting there, but there's nothing that I can currently think of that's really on par with Illustrator. For the special case of diagrams, Dia does a pretty good job -- as a matter of fact, I find it to be much faster to enter data into Dia than Visio.

* Natural media raster graphics -- Like Painter, software for producing natural-looking artwork on a computer. Essentially nonexistent in the OSS world -- apparently nobody wants to do a thesis on modelling natural media effects mathematically.

* Video Editing -- not sure what the best of breed is here. I'd be interested in hearing from people about what there is.

* Spreadsheet -- from what I've heard, unless perfect Office compatibility is a primary goal, Gnumeric can pretty much handle anything that Excel can.

* Presentation -- Not sure about how current software adds up. Last time I tried OO.org's presentation module, it was too buggy for day-to-day use and inverted a number of elements of an imported Powerpoint presentation.

* Word Processor -- unless Office compatibility is a primary issue, Open Office seems to be acceptable. I used to run into a number of cosmetic bugs, but it seems to have been cleaned up a lot, even if it is still a bit slow and has a widget set that works differently from native sets.

There are a lot of projects out there, and even a lot of promising ones, but there are few areas that open source content creation apps are on par with their commercial counterparts today, unfortunately (well, as I see it).

Re:The state of Linux content production software

[torpor]

There are a lot of projects out there, and even a lot of promising ones, but there are few areas that open source content creation apps are on par with their commercial counterparts today, unfortunately (well, as I see it).


Ah, but the point is there is work being done, and progress is being made.

It may not be commercial movement, but it is movement.

Re:The state of Linux content production software

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI if you didn't know some of the Sodipodi developer base grew impatient and forked the code. The new app, Inkscape is off to a very fast, very promising start.

Re:The state of Linux content production software

[Rysc]

XMMS, the Linux WinAMP clone, seems to be primarily static -- I don't see a lot of development on it these days.


The GTK2 port is a fork named Goom. Look for Goom Media Player to start showing up this year. Right now lots of rewriting seems to be going on. They're breaking some plugin stuff while they're switching, so expect big things.

There's also a project to make a more Winamp3-style XMMS, but I forget its name.

WRT gnumeric: Last I knew it was more compatible with Excel than OO.o. It's sure as hell faster and more feature rich. The OO.o spreadsheets only advantage is being part of the package, and everything that goes with that.

Re:The state of Linux content production software

[Praeluceo]

Presentation - I run the projector at my Church, and for over a year now we've used OpenOffice.org Impress for all weekly presentations. That means creating a file each week with the lyrics to a few songs split up into easy-to-read sections. I've created an Impress template for each season, and use the template to create new files each week.

I'd also like to mention that all post-production audio editing is done within Audacity for the Church. That is, all of the service (the Pastor preaching, the singing, the guest speakers, et al) is recorded off of our crummy mics into our EuroRack UB2442FX-Pro board, and from there goes straight into Audacity and the hard drive. I then boost the volume a bit, and clean up static and pops and hisses and whatnot before burning to CD for people who want it.

I do notice that after a cursory glance (upgraded from 1.1.3 to 1.2) the "auto adjust volume" feature seems to be missing, where oh where did it go? Now I have to use the "boost" button, which doesn't seem as friendly to me.

And yeah, on a mildly unrelated note:
I'm sick of the XMMS developers, and the "community" behind them. I'm a lousy coder, so I'm not one to speak, but if you're going to maintain a project, especially one as well known as XMMS, please oh please keep it up-to-date!
What I wouldn't give for a Wasabi-based media player in Linux, something like Winamp3 -should- have been. I've stopped using XMMS for now, it just isn't developed, and barely plays the audio files I want it to. I've been using "juk" lately, and have grown to like it a lot. I wish it had an OSD plugin, but I like how it pops up the current song, and lets you quickly skip it. I just wish the "History" ranked songs by how many completed listenings it's had, maybe the latest version does so, I haven't upgraded to KDE 3.2 yet.

And finally, the parent says OpenOffice.org Writer "seems to be acceptable", but I would argue that it's more than acceptible, I prefer it to MS Word. I've used it since the 1.0 RCs for all of my homework assignments, granted StarOffice 5.2 was very near "garbage" quality, and I never used it seriously, but right now at OOo 1.1 I can say its the sweetest word processor I've ever used. I absolutely love Writer's export to PDF and to Palm Docbook formats. I enjoy its clean interface, and despite being blamed (rightly so) in the past for being slow and pokey, 1.1 is speedy enough for me, and directly competitive with Microsoft Office 97 & 2000, which is what I, my parents, my girlfriend, another friend of mine, and my Church were converting from. Actually, my girlfriend had MSOffice XP, but I convinced her to try OpenOffice.org, since it has the pdf feature in Windows, and she types up notes for classmates that don't always have Word (I want to shoot the person who invented MS Works). Her school, the University of Oregon, also has a great system. When school starts all students get two CDs, one is an application CD, the other is a "Windows Updater". The latter CD updated their computers before they got onto the network to protect them against the slew of viruses released over the summer, the former CD had "essential programs" for all students, including a virus scanner, firewall, WinZip, and OpenOffice.org 1.1. How cool is that? Even a nice little installer saying that if the student doesn't have MS Word, this is the preferred Word Processor.

Re:The state of Linux content production software

[fucksl4shd0t]

Actually, I think XMMS got abandoned, if I recall correctly. We need a new media player, that's for sure. XMMS isn't that good anyway.... heh.

I think it's important to keep in mind that LInux is still a pretty young desktop platform. WE've had to replace 99% of all desktop software with Free stuff, and for many years there wasn't a lot of money in doing it, so there hasn't (until recently) been a lot of corporate support, and the corporate stuff we do have now is mostly server-based.

So, yeah, of course Linux is somewhat behind the other systems. But Windows has been under development since the early 80s, and it wasn't usable until, well, it's still not usable. :)

I think it's pretty telling that the top of the line software for audio production and desktop publishing and all kinds of crap is Apple-based with PC ports. Apple is the longest-running stable platform so far, even though they've made a few compatibility changes over the years. In any case, Mac lovers have been using macs since the mid 80s for a range of multimedia tasks, and PCs didn't get good enough to do the same stuff until the mid-90s.

SO, yeah, Linux is still a young platform by comparison.

I know, you weren't trash-talking Linux, you were just making a status report, but I think it's important to remember that Linux is still pretty young while we're looking at the status report. Means it's come a long way in a short time, and that's pretty damn good. When you consider the pace, which is accelerating, this year is shaping out to be a fine year--technologically.

Now we just need to put Blockers in front of all the WIndows machines so the lemmings will turn around and go somewhere else.... ;)

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[0x0d0a]

Not many people know about Linux audio software -- the Linux audio world is surprisingly quiet (no pun intended). It's easy to lose track of how usable Linux is for audio work...this is kind of like a new version of Apache is for the Linux webserver world. Audacity has at least the potential to be the best-in-field for what it does at the moment, so it's a bit of a big deal.

To be honest, if Linux video editing becomes significantly more feasible suddenly, where one can swap out a Windows or Mac box and use Linux in its place happily, and kino is to credit for this, then I suspect that kino will be on Slashdot before long...

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[madsdyd]

Hmmm. Kino is not KDE software. Actually it uses gtk2 - and I even think some Gnome2 stuff (although it is in the process of getting removed)

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[nutznboltz]

Freshmeat? What's an omelette without some fresh meat?

Great recorder too

[dubbayu_d_40]

I've run my line out to my line in and record 2+ hour streams with it. Last time I looked (years ago), I couldn't find any free recorders that recorded to file.

Re:Great recorder too

[Anonymous Coward]

I've run my line out to my line in and record 2+ hour streams with it. Last time I looked (years ago), I couldn't find any free recorders that recorded to file.

CDEX will let you do that. Most people think of CDEX as a ripper, but it does lots of other things too like converting WAV-->MP3 and line-in to MP3

Re:Great recorder too

[tehdaemon]

You must be using windoze, 'cause under linux, rec (a front end to sox) is a simple command-line program that does exactally that.

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[Lumpy]

sorry kino is a cute toy dv editor.

call me when you have a replacement for premiere 4.0

as there is NOTHING that is even near that.

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[madsdyd]

Did I write anything that indicated that Kino is or will be a replacement for Premiere?

That said, I would personally rather use Kino.

Windows, too

[Evil Grinn]

Audacity is also pretty darn useful on Windows. It fills a niche between Windows' built-in sound recorder program (that will only record one minute) and more advanced non-free (in any sense of the word) apps. I am not aware of another free sound editor for Windows with the features of Audacity.

Re:Windows, too

[dave420]

Score:4,Unresearched

:-P

check this out Closed source, but free as in beer/hookers/whatever :-P

Re:Windows, too

[squabsy]

cdwave is a basic windows sound recorder that I used for recording my vinyl before I met the penguin

Re:Windows, too

[Anonymous Coward]

Krystal audio Engine. They just put out a new version. It's totally free and extremely good.

Re:Windows, too

[nicky_d]

Not that I'd recommend it, but there's a workaround to the one-minute limit in Windows' sound recorder: record and save a minute of silence, then use the "insert file" command to add it to your new recording file as often as you like, up to the length you want.

This would be handy if you were caught in the desert with only a laptop with a bare install of Windows 98 and a built-in microphone, and you wanted to capture the sound of the vultures picking at your carcass, and you thought they might take longer than one minute.

Wiki ClickPop entry

[IronyChef]

Wiki ClickPop entry

The compression effect works nicely for removing clicks and pops from recordings (don't apply post compression gain for this!); the low pass filter is easier sometimes or you may need the pencil; use the magnifer (on the control toolbar) to magnify on one pop for selection.

Doing the opposite ?

[Thomas Miconi]

Many songs put the vocalist at the center so this is a useful way to remove vocals from a song.

What I'd like to know is how you can remove the instrumental background so you only have the vocals.

Would be damn useful for Bjork remixes.

Thomas Miconi

WMA to MP3 support?

[discogravy]

can it convert wma to mp3? that's a feature that would be veeeeeeeery convinient (especially for those converting their wma files from windows media player to mp3s for itunes, like me).

Re:WMA to MP3 support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try:
mplayer myfile.wma -ao pcm -aofile outfile.wav

then convert outfile.wav to mp3 (I think the command's 'lame' but I'd use oggenc myself).

Re:WMA to MP3 support?

[nicky_d]

In support of this suggestion, you can get the mplayer binaries, and a GUI player, from here.

You could also use Audio Hijack, which is (very nicce) shareware, or Wiretap, which is free(beer)ware.

I find mplayer is very nice to have around and will often chip in and help where Quicktime fails. Same can be said of VLC.

Re: ALSA and xmms

[Anonymous Coward]

XMMS had a major (point) release last month, and a bugfix release a few weeks after that. Before that, yes, it had been static for a long while - hopefully the period of dormancy is over!

ALSA mixes in software just fine for me - check the dmix plugin:

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugi n

I don't use arts or esd (you're quite right, they add horrible latency), and all my ALSA enabled apps mix sounds perfectly, plus any one OSS app of my choice, using aoss. I have a brand X soundcard that doesn't support hardware mixing.

Yes, but

[autechre]

I'm glad such "free replacement for x" software exists right now. Coming up with entirely new ideas and ways of doing something is HARD, and coming up with ones that work and that people want to use is even harder. I mean, I haven't thought of anything, and I did recording for years (although I admit I take a "record a good band correctly the first time and you won't _need_ a pile of effects" approach). Is there something you want?

If your goal is "do studio work using Linux", then it's good to have some tools to do it in familiar ways. I'll take "possible" when "innovative" is going to be much longer in coming. I think that many of these projects will start to come up with their own features that make them unique once they feel they have enough "standard" functionality to work for most users.

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[autechre]

No, we require all freshmeat announcements to have good spelling and grammar by the time they hit our front page :)

Minor nit - stops audio when launched in OS X

[sjonke]

A minor nit - when I launch Audacity in OS X it kills sound from other applications, particularly iTunes. I have to stop and start playback in iTunes to get the sound back. Not a big deal, but slightly annoying. It seems like a pretty nice audio editor albeit with a somewhat clunky user interface. I really want to drag that little playback triangle around, but can't! The change tempo and change pitch effects are highly amusing. I just wish it could directly input and output AAC format, but I suppose that's unlikely.

Audacity Rocks

[FatherBusa]

Audacity really rocks, and one of the reasons it rocks is because people like me (who know virtually nothing about sound engineering) can use it do do simple things (like cutting and pasting sound segments).

It's really a model for how to create usable software.

Re:Audacity Rocks

[unother]

Eh? What in tarnation?!

You do realize that Audacity is merely an open-source program re-implementing the ideas and interface of venerable sound editing programs such as SoundEdit 16 and Peak, don't you?

It's not cutting edge, y'know. It's merely an OSS + Linux-ized version of software that exists quite readily in the commercial world for The Big Two OSes. To call it a "model" is just a mite bit uninformed.

Re:Audacity Rocks

[croddy]

I've spent many long hours working in Peak and in Audacity, and not only is Audacity more stable, but the interface is a whole lot faster and more intuitive.

and Peak and SoundEdit 16 don't support LADSPA plugins. Audacity does.

kudos, Dominic et al! along with Samba, LADSPA, and Ardour, your software has been critical in all the recording I've done recently.

Rezound

[Anonymous Coward]

http://rezound.sourceforge.net
I think this is better...

Re:Rezound

[Anonymous Coward]

rezound is nice, but it's like SoundForge. Audacity is a multi-track recorder more like Cakewalk or the like. Different tools for different jobs...

Re:Videoediting

[madsdyd]

I like Kino - so much that I actually contributed to it. Lots of people seem to like Cinerella There are a lot of other projects.

How about OS X?

[interactive_civilian]

Just out of curiosity, since JACK and Qt have been ported to OS X and there is a lot of work being done to get KDE and its libraries working natively on OSX, would it be difficult to get Rosegarden working on OS X as well?

IANAProgrammer...

Why I Like Audacity

[TheSync]

I don't have the most recent version, but Audacity is simple, but still pretty cool!

I am working on an art project where I need to synchronize touch tones in the right channel with spoken speech in the left channel. While I have to generate the DTMF tones in Sound Forge, I bring them into a multi-track editing session in Audacity to actually get the synchronization correct, then just export out the final stereo sound file.

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[Freultwah]

Try Cinelerra.

For Windows Users Only

[blackmonday]

If you're running windows, check out this software. Closed source but free. 16 tracks, and supports VST. Looks nice.

The "Entry Level," Audacity and GarageBand

[jackDuhRipper]

This is excellent news - Audacity's been useful for awhile and, as it gets further polish, it'll be that much better for folks who can use this kind of audio tool.

Per many of the comments already posted, that audience is growing well beyond traditional musicians - this is an Excellent Thing as it means more people can do more interesting - and better sounding - things.

Tools like this, and GarageBand (yes; only for OS X) enable a musician to flesh out ideas and create good sounding demos to share with friends. It also let's "non-traditional musicians" to play with loops, cutting & pasting of sound files, and generally mucking around with sound to have fun. It shouldn't be taken lightly - it's akin to desktop and web publishing capabilities that began to explode as the tools got better and easier to use.

Re:The "Entry Level," Audacity and GarageBand

[PCM2]

Tools like this, and GarageBand [apple.com] (yes; only for OS X) enable a musician to flesh out ideas and create good sounding demos to share with friends. It also let's "non-traditional musicians" to play with loops, cutting & pasting of sound files, and generally mucking around with sound to have fun. It shouldn't be taken lightly - it's akin to desktop and web publishing capabilities that began to explode as the tools got better and easier to use.

Ah, yes ... and as we all recall, the advent of desktop publishing was an unprecedented boon to the -- um -- photocopied newsletter industry.

Re:The "Entry Level," Audacity and GarageBand

[jackDuhRipper]

If your point was that 99.44% of what individuals self-published was crap, I agree - and further agree that the same percentage of stuff done with tools like Audacity will likely suffer the same percentages. That said, putting the tools in the hands of the masses is Good for the masses as well as the folks who build the tools.

The Audacity team has had a fine product out there for some time; I'm sure 1.2 will be that much better, and will push the level of expectation for "entry level" up for users and software producers alike.

And you of all people should know desktop publishing gave us 'zines, comix, as well as homegrown amateur pornography.

Before the advent of vanity sites and blogs, desktopPub was what certain creative-types used to do with their time to get their bitching and moaning "heard."

Oh, yeah - it also kinda became a multi-billion dollar industry that begat other multi-billion-dollar industries.

yr pal -

s mcnally

Re:Woohhoooooooo!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad you were trying for third. You are such a fucking failure. You were attempting to be a loser, by trying for third instead of first, but you even screwed that up.

You are pathetic.

Linux audio apps still laughable

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux audio developers have been generating lots of code but they still lack adequate packaging, user documentation, and usability. Audacity is particularly bad about forcing everything into a "project". Have we learned nothing from this previous story?

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[Lumpy]

Cinelerra is still early alpha. and I even bought main actor, the commercial linux video editing app that makes cinerella look really unfinished and it is horribly buggy and can not read raw DV2 files.

when it doesnt crash and will start reading real DV2 files I'll be interested.

in fact KINO wont read DV2 files only the lower resolution DV1 format. and I certianly dont want to convert to quicktime causing yet another generation of loss.

until there is a viable premiere replacement for linux it's not viable.

then in order to even make anyone notice.. an after-effects is required and nobody is even thinking of working on that.

I'm willing to pay sane amounts of cash for these apps, ($600.00 for each app.. not that stupid price that apple put's on their app) but nobody is willing to make them.

Re:Indeed!

[Anonymous Coward]

It took you two years to get a first post? I was right, you are pathetic.

You aren't even worthy enough to kiss the tip of my dick.

Inkscape is vector graphics software!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

SODIPODI - vector 2D maturing nicely http://www.sodipodi.com/

Dont forget to try Inkscape http://www.inkscape.org
Originally based on Sodipodi but it has a much friendlier user interface.

It's a multitrack editor

[bach37]

Audacity is a multitrack editor- something that most of the $50-$70 similar software titles cannot do!

Scott in NC

Re:It's a multitrack editor

[Anonymous Coward]

Audacity is a multitrack editor- something that most of the $50-$70 similar software titles cannot do!

But Pro Tools Free can do it... For free.

Re:It's a multitrack editor

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Audacity is a multitrack editor- something that most of the $50-$70 similar software titles cannot do!

But Pro Tools Free can do it... For free.

Which is great, unless you run Mac OS X or Linux. (Pro Tools Free is for Mac OS 9 and Windows only.) Or you want support for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Or you want something that's reasonably easy to use. Or you want an open-source solution to customize.

Is Audacity JACK-aware? Will it be?

[Bootsy Collins]

My understanding was that Audacity was being made to do I/O through JACK; but I look at the Release Notes for this release and I don't see that.

Running Ardour through JACK (with realtime capabilities), I get sub-millisecond latencies and no XRUNs at all. I'd like to be able to use Audacity under similar terms.

Re:Videoediting

[TuxBeej]

I used Cinelerra for a project in my Japanese theatre class and it was a *very* steep learning curve. Of course, it was also the first time I had done any sort of non-linear video editing, so that is probably paritally to blame.

After I got used to the interface and the specific methods of inserting transitions and whatnot, I found it pretty simple to add in voice-over tracks and sound/video effects. I was also using it on a Duron 933 w/ 512 MB RAM - not at all a powerhouse video-editing workstation by any stretch of the imagination (check the recommended system on the Cinelerra home page).

I basically just imported clips from a FireWire digicam, spliced in some clips from some anime to illustrate my points, and added effects to clean up the transitions. I didn't get the project done, but I did find that learning the software was a fun experience. I'll probably try it again someday, but this time, I'll be using a better class of system.

I would definitely recommend that people at least *try* Cinelerra when they have some time to spare to learn the interface. Having not tried Kino for some such forgotten reason, I can't compare the two.
--

Re: try goldwave too

[Wilk4]

Goldwave is a nice, inexpensive sound editor, with good features. worth checking out, particularly since it's uncrippled shareware.

I use it for making MP3's of sermons for our church website. Nice features at a great cost.

Re:Is Audacity JACK-aware? Will it be?

[mbrubeck]

Yes, native ALSA and JACK support are being developed for PortAudio (the input/output layer used by Audacity).

Video

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using kino to capture off of my firewire camera and cinelerra to edit. As said cinelerra takes some getting used to (moving clips around is not intuitive, and it crashes a lot), but it is pretty powerful and gets the job done. (Note that I don't think that kino is all that intuitive either the gui isn't very discoverable. After I'm done editing, I render back to mov (cinelerra native format), and open up kino again and use kino to convert to mpeg for svcd or dvd.

Hopefully cinelerra gets more stable and the editing on the timeline a little more intuitive

Nightmare for equipment brokers, wet dream for us

[Dr. Zowie]

One of my friends' dad works in the studio-equipment business. As he pointed out, almost the only thing left for them to "sell" is the nice look-and-feel of a full sound board with thousands of manual controls on it. Even traditional-looking soundboards these days are mostly front ends for digital mixers.

Audacity is a case in point -- a small workstation with a few SoundBlaster cards can handle as many tracks as you like and produce sound at least as good as was used to make all that old vinyl, and costs under $1,000. Ultimately, that means anyone who can afford an instrument can probably afford to play at being a sound engineer, with really good postprocessing equipment.

I've been using Audacity for about a year and a half to work my way through my record collection, mp3ifying it. It's great -- I record the records with a SoundBlaster card, depop the recording with some shareware, and noise-gate, adjust levels, and chop up the tracks with Audacity. The results sound better than the original vinyl, since the noise gating gets rid of the surface noise.

My rip of "Layla" off the original Derek and the Dominos vinyl is clear enough that you can hear the master's tape hiss change as each of those famously many mixing tracks gets switched in and out by the recording engineer. I never noticed that when I used to just play the record -- but once the the vinyl surface noise is gated out, it's obvious.

Audacity is good enough that I was able to digitize a friend's old clay '45 of the Clouds singing "Wyatt Earp" in the late 1950s -- even after the record had broken in half! I superglued it back together and played it at 33rpm. Of course, there were two loud "pops" for each revolution of the record, since there's no way I could line the grooves up perfectly. In fact, it wouldn't play at 45 -- the bumps would throw the needle out of the groove. But I was able to go in with Audacity and clip out all the pops, then resample to get a full-speed recording. The resulting MP3 accurately reproduces the sound-and-feel of a 1960s era jukebox :-)

Re:Plugins are working fine in Linux, with LAPSDA

[dave420]

But there are even more plugins only for windows, unfortunately. Coupled with the fact Cool Edit supports DirectX filters and any other sort of filter it can get its hands on, means linux has a lot of catch-up to play...

Sound Forge?

[Uksi]

How does this tool compare to Sound Forge (e.g. versions 5 and 6) in terms of capabilities and ease of use?

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cinelerra is nice.

It's Getting Somewhere...

[eston]

I've been using Audacity since its really early beta releases on Win32 and OS X (and now, on Linux), and even with 1.0 I was frustrated by how instable it was. It's more stable now, and I love its multitrack feature, but it's still lacking the stability that's required for when I'm making a recording longer than ten minutes. :p On OS X Audacity seems to find it amusing to crash right as I finish a recording.

Not even close.

[RatBastard]

It doen't even compair to SoundForge 4.5 (which is what I have on my Windows box). But it doesn't cost as much as SoundForge, either. With a little effort and some good VST files you can do quite a lot with it.

Not even close

[Dog and Pony]

Funny, we as Game developers recently evaluated three of those tools you are mentioning: GIMP, Blender and Sodipodi - none of them are close to being usable. Actually, most of the time it isn't that they can't do the work - it's the fact that NOONE ever puts any thought into the interfaces. And there are no, or bad, docs on the subject either. Sure, they lack features too, but no showstopping ones.

Sodipodi might come out being usable someday, but our GFX artists probably never will try Blender or GIMP again after having to go through this horrible experience (press TAB to save a state, to be able to make an undo, anyone?).

Why, oh why is it taboo to replicate something that *works* and works *fine*??? If somebody took the excellent core code of these apps and just copied the interface from the leaders, these apps would grow their user numbers by factors of tens immideately. Lots of people are looking for free (in several meanings) replacements for the apps they use, but it will still be cheaper in terms of money *and* sanity to pay for Maya and Photoshop than to wrestle with stupidness every day.

Do something about it, or forever stand in the shadows.

Re:Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are they not cloning the comercial interfaces? My guess is because most of the developers decided to instead create the kind of interface they themselves would prefer to use. It might sound odd, but some people, including myself, actually prefer the interface of the Gimp to Photoshop.

OSS is NOT about 'spare time' developers

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not all as simple as that. I think that if small groups of people working in their spare time can write something that competes with commercial software, that just goes to show how much we're being over-charged for software

Nor is it as simple as that. Without COMMERCIAL software companies contributing to apps and kernels (while charging "too much" for some things), OSS would not be advancing as fast as it is.

There are a lot of PAID contributors who work on The GIMP, other Open Source apps (MySQL and PostreSQL spring to mind) and the Linux Kernel itself, for that matter. Sometimes these people are employed by large COMMERCIAL entities like IBM, RedHat, or the like as part of their own OpenSource marketing and strategies. Other times, the contributors take the form of employees at small COMMERCIAL entities that require new features or critical fixes to OpenSource products, so those contributions find their way back into the code. Those are people PAID by COMMERCIAL software or integration companies. Other times, it's independent consultants who CHARGE MONEY to their client to install, integrate, or otherwise supply OpenSource solutions to their clients who may need new features or bug fixes.

Take a look at the CVS entries for your favorie OSS app or OS, and notice that a lot of OSS contributors work for COMMERCIAL software companies. Now some of those are certainly spare time developers, but there's nothing like COMMERCIAL interests to accelerate certain features, hardware support, bug fixes, etc.

Re:OSS is NOT about 'spare time' developers

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Nor is it as simple as that. Without COMMERCIAL software companies contributing to apps and kernels (while charging "too much" for some things), OSS would not be advancing as fast as it is.

There are a lot of PAID contributors who work on The GIMP, other Open Source apps (MySQL and PostreSQL spring to mind) and the Linux Kernel itself, for that matter.

That's true, but for every paid developer, there are often dozens of part-time volunteers who have made very significant contributions.

Audacity does not have any paid developers, though we have many volunteers who would love to get paid to work on Audacity if anyone wanted to sponsor us!

Has to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

(but I'm too "AC" to sacrifice karma to say it). Actually, it's quite clear that you are not using Audacity, "right now". You are quite obviously using a web browser interfacing to another program called slash. ;-) (winks) .

Re:Has to be said...

[Bootsy Collins]

Actually, it's quite clear that you are not using Audacity, "right now"

Especially since I was talking about Ardour!

Re:Luxuriosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently on eBay, I found a piece of software called Luxuriousity Audio. It does everything that Audacity does, and more! For only $9.99,

Well, everything Luxuriosity sells is repackaged open source software. Including Audacity.

Small specialty tools.

[GAVollink]

This is actually the basis of the long success of UNIX in general. Several very small and specialized functions that can all interact in a standarized way.

• sed
• awk
• tex
• cut

- They can all do text formatting, but each in a slightly different way. All of these are standard, not because any are better, but because each has it's own strengths.

I've only had cubase crash on me a few times...

[Phil John]

...if you stick with decent plugins you'll be fine.

In fact, now that I think about it I've only ever had my current install (Cubase SX) crash on my once and that was due to a buggy asio driver update for my soundcard. Rolled back the driver and hey presto it was fine again.

There really is no competition now for the PC studio software market now that logic pc has gone the way of the dodo and become mac only. And don't even mention cakewalk, any software that until recently only supported direct-x plugins on the pc doesn't have any business calling itself pro ;o)

http://www.adobe.com/special/products/audition/syn

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe Systems Incorporated acquired the technology assets of Syntrillium Software in May 2003. On August 18th, 2003 Adobe released a rebranded version of Cool Edit Pro 2.1 as Adobe Audition(TM) software.

Adobe Audition is the same great Cool Edit Pro that you know and love along with the addition of enhanced integration with Adobe Premiere(R) Pro(R) and Adobe After Effects(R) 6.0 software. Adobe Audition also includes 4,500 high-quality royalty-free loops so you can make your own music quickly and easily.

Syntrillium's other products -- Cool Edit 2000, Red Rover, Snoqualmie, Wind Chimes, Kaleidoscope, and the content available on the Loopology.com site -- have been discontinued.
If you own Cool Edit Pro 2.x, you can download a complimentary upgrade to Adobe Audition. To download and install Adobe Audition, you will need to provide your Cool Edit Pro 2.x serial number and have Cool Edit Pro 2.x installed on your computer.
If you own Cool Edit 2000 or Cool Edit Pro 1.x, you can purchase an upgrade to Adobe Audition for just $99.

You can purchase Adobe Audition for just $299

- - - -
Cool edit aint cool if it aint free if u ask me.

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[timothy]

long-haired troublemaker.

Imagine Kevin Kline's character of Otto beating down on you.

timothy

Good for you...

[Dog and Pony]

... too bad for OSS. :/

dealing with lots of files

[son_of_asdf]

Just grabbed it and had a preliminary look: I'm really liking what I see, with one caveat.

In the course of my daily work, I have to deal with many hundreds of small audio files simultaneously. When I tried to open up 85 individual files in Audacity, well, it wasn't pretty.

If this one issue is resolved, I can ditch Sound Forge (and thus my need to constantly reboot into Win2000) for day to day chopping and cleaning tasks. I can't wait.

Looping, Pitch, Speed & Tempo change

[awful]

Nice to see that you can now loop audio - this makes composition much quicker.

And the pitch, tempo and speed effects mean that Audacity has just taken a big step towards the pro packages like ACID. Of course ACID has a lot more to it than what Audacity 1.2 has, but slowly slowly catch the monkey.

Re:Looping, Pitch, Speed & Tempo change

[GuruJ]

I'm with you - I haven't tried the package yet, but if the sound quality is still good after change pitch/tempo, that is FANTASTIC!

Well done to the crew of Audacity!

Re:Looping, Pitch, Speed & Tempo change

[mjc_w]

I like preferential! Nice work.

(Shows how far OOTL I am that I never heard of it before this.)

Re:Nightmare for equipment brokers, wet dream for

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember - mixing consoles will always be a better interface for what they do than the equivalent on a screen.

Which isn't to say that someday the processing side won't be on the computer with a control interface on the outside (a la Mackie's HUI or some of Tascam's baby controls, or even what I got set up with my 01V sending MIDI to my sequencer) but trust someone who records on this - a keyboard and mouse will never replace a fader bank.

Re:Nightmare for equipment brokers, wet dream for

[Dr. Zowie]

a keyboard and mouse will never replace a fader bank.

So true. Hardwired controls just plain work better than a simulation on screen. On the other hand, for those of us who don't have $100k for a nice studio-quality setup, a $600 system with a crappy soundblaster card has much better quality than even a $5k four-track system would have in the 80s.

Re:Nightmare for equipment brokers, wet dream for

[otis wildflower]

How about USB/Firewire control banks?

great for creating .wav phone ringers ;)

[otis wildflower]

.. the extent of my audio talent at this point is plucking favorite samples to use as .wav (or .au after conversion) ringers...

Still, it'd be super if there were ARTS or ALSA integration..

Re:Nightmare for equipment brokers, wet dream for

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir have far too much time on your hands

A couple of good examples of innovation

[Tharald]

I have two really good examples of open source innovation that I use every day: Mozilla(firefox) and KDE(sorry, I dont use GNOME). These two "packages" contain lots of innovation with every update. Have you looked at all the extensions to mozilla? Theres innovation for you. And KDE 3.2 is great. The speed at which it improves is amazing. Projects usually just have to spent some time getting started and catching up. If you compare to proprietary alternatives I think OSS is evolving and innovation at a much higher pace.

-TN

Correction

[tehdaemon]

Grumble... apparently the -q 10 option to oggenc overrides the -b 128 option. it actually was encoded at about 500kbps. I need to rerun everything to double check.

Re:Correction

[alexpage]

Please let us know when you do, I'm very interested in this.

Re:Correction

[tehdaemon]

Done. Results are that the differences between a wav and its mp3 are about the same as the differences between an ogg and the mp3 it was made from. The magnitudes are similar, as are the spectrum views except for frequencies above ~15kHz. My guess for this is that the mp3 lost all of the high frequencies to start with and the ogg didn't put any in at all. I also compared the ogg to the original wave. The magnitude is a little larger than the wave-mp3 diff, but not much. The spectrum of the ogg-wav diff looks almost exactlly the same as the mp3-wav diff. Also, I used variable bitrates for both the ogg and mp3, and the ogg actually averaged 111 kbps, and the mp3 was 123 kbps. If you use a higher bitrate ogg (say 180 kbps) the loss is notacibly smaller than the initial mp3 loss.

I can barely hear any difference between the ogg and the original wav file. With audio recorded off of the radio (instead of ripped from a cd) I could not hear any difference at all. As far as i know I am not deaf or anything, and I am testing this on THX certified speakers. SB live! soundcard too.

Conclusion: Transcoding is not a big deal at higher bitrates. Total loss going from wav-mp3-ogg is about the same, or less than the loss with an FM radio broadcast. Lower bitrates probably matter.

How about Video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Audacity has been a great software for processing sound. However there seems to be a big gap in open source software for Video editing. Yeah there are a few software but as good as audacity...

Any suggestions on the Video processing front?

Multiplatform == lowest common denominator

[Latent Heat]

Multiplatform unfortunately has a lowest-common-denominator effect. Think of it -- if all the platforms all had the same features but were just called a little differently, they would all be in reality the same platform.

The Audacity spectrogram (I suppose it is just an add on and not the primary focus) is a dithered multi-color mess that scrolls like molasses.

Windows offers 1) hardware assisted scroll with ScrollWindowEx, 2) vertical retrace synch, two features that go a long way to making a good scrolling waveform display/spectrum analyser that I don't see in and of the platform portable tool kits. Those features, by the way, were added to Windows when 2-D scrolling games were a big thing (ScrollWindowEx I believe was part of WinG and vertical synch is part of IDirectDraw). Windows is a little weak in the latency department, but running everything on really fast processors is kind of taking care of that.

What is out there that is an improvement on Windows in this regard? I heard BeOS had very low latencies (I had heard the same about OS/2), but both those systems are pretty much past history if you want to reach a lot of people.

Re:LAPSDA plugins, not DirectX filters

[zero0w]

Have you actually tried to run the Linux version bundled with LADSPA plugins?

It bundles with, by default, around 100 built-in plugins. No need for separate installation, and for Windows version, you will need to download and install new plugins on your own (which I do not even know, until I compare with the Linux version).

Yeah, there's always an 'catch-up' paradigm going around, but 100 plugins is a lot to play with (I am sure you can grab more if you are determined to, but that's another adventure on your own); one can keep saying Audacity needs to catch up to 'program XYZ' because that program is 'how much better', but the previous post was to illustrate the fact that plugin support is already there with Linux.

BTW, Kernel 2.6 + ALSA 1.0 + dmix software mixing will certainly put Linux audio recording in the picture. I don't think I will miss Cool Edit much longer.

Audacity uses the wxWidgets toolkit

[motown]

For the interested folks who are impressed by the quality of its GUI under various Operating Systems: Audacity makes use of the wxWind...Oops, wxWidgets-toolkit. AFAIK, this is one of the most prominent applications based on this toolkit. It really shows off the quality of wxWidgets as a cross-platform GUI toolkit.

wxWidgets is released under the LGPL-license, making it suitable for both open- and closed-source application development.

Audacity is such a cool and useful tool. Linux NEEDS more quality applications like this. Excellent work, Audacity developers! Keep up the good work! :-)

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

[williwilli]

iirc filmGimp is a compositing application. of course, combustion by discreet is better than After effects ;)