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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
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?
With Ardour, JAMin, and Audacity my cost (software) to record is $0.00.
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).
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. --
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.
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wow! maybe Australian local television networks can actually afford to make their advertisments sound decent now!
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.
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
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.
Underholdning.info
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
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
" ... 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.
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).
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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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.