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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."
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.
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.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
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
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