Slashdot Mirror
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."
2004-2000 = ~ 2 years
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.
Underholdning.info
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.
stuff |
Programs like this are a big step forward for the dream of "Linux on the Desktop"
I use Audacity a lot to do "Out Of Phase Stereo" or OOPS to remove the "center" of a stereo recording. .MP3, .OGG, or .WAV song
Many songs put the vocalist at the center so this is a useful way to remove vocals from a song.
1) Load your favorite
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.
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?
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).
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).
TC - My Photos..
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:
... Very interesting.
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
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
As a game developer, I need tools like Audacity to make and tweak the lame little sfx in my games. ;)
Congrats guys and gals!!!
wow! maybe Australian local television networks can actually afford to make their advertisments sound decent now!
Does it support recording to hdd and does it declick recordings from phono?
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!
If you have Mandrake 9.2, it should be possible to install it there as well.
Perhaps I can take advantage of this discussion to ask a quick question..
/dev/dsp, which records everything, i.e. "What U Hear".
/dev/mixer in the config file, but the effect was the same.
/. crowd.
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
I tried changing it to
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
Before you ask, I have STFW somewhat on this..
We do agree: Ardour rocks.
... 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.
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
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...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I was so excited when I saw "Debian" listed on the download page, til I discovered it was about some _POTATO_ packages! :^(
:^( Anyone built Audacity 1.2.0 for Woody yet? C'mon! Backports! Backports! I LIVE off 'em! ;^)
:^P )
I tried replacing "potato" with "woody" in the apt source URL, but to no avail.
-bill!
(yes, yes, I know about apt-pinning
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
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.
Skill is successfully walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Intelligence is not trying. -- Anonymous
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.
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).
May we never see th
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...
May we never see th
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.
where there's fish, there's cats
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.
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
No, we require all freshmeat announcements to have good spelling and grammar by the time they hit our front page :)
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
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.
--- What?
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.
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
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.
http://rezound.sourceforge.net
I think this is better...
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.
If you're running windows, check out this software. Closed source but free. 16 tracks, and supports VST. Looks nice.
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.
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.
--
Brendan "Beej" Dery "Only in Canada, eh?"
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.
I use it for making MP3's of sermons for our church website. Nice features at a great cost.
Yes, native ALSA and JACK support are being developed for PortAudio (the input/output layer used by Audacity).
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 :-)
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.
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.
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!
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"