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Audacity 1.2.0 Released
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Mar 02, 2004 07:08 AM
from the cross-platform-and-smooth dept.
from the cross-platform-and-smooth dept.
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."
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Slashdot math... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Slashdot math... (Score:5, Informative)
To clarify, it has been two years since we last released a stable version of Audacity, version 1.0.
Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer
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Re:Slashdot math... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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Re:Slashdot math... (Score:4, Funny)
Where I'm from, it's "10"
(j/k)
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Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:5, Informative)
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
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Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:5, Informative)
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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The world of Out Of Phase Stereo (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo (Score:5, Funny)
Stop him! He's trying to make more songs available for Karaoke!
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Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo (Score:5, Funny)
Then I could fake karaoke!
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Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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still lack vital ui feature? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Good point! (Score:5, Informative)
-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.
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!Cool! (Score:4, Interesting)
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! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:!Cool! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:!Cool! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Rock on Linux!!! (Score:5, Informative)
GALAN - Graphical Audio Language [sourceforge.net]
and
Specimen, MIDI sampler for Linux [gazuga.net]
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
Re:Rock on Linux!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Another "killer app" is Rosegarden [all-day-breakfast.com], which is rapidly becoming a suitable replacement for Steinberg Cubase. The Hydrogen [sf.net] sample based drum machine is also worth a mention. The exciting thing is that JACK [sourceforge.net] 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
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The state of Linux content production software (Score:5, Informative)
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 [stanford.edu], 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 [all-day-breakfast.com] 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).
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maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
this is good for OSS (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:this is good for OSS (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:this is good for OSS (Score:4, Informative)
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
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Mandrake package available (Score:5, Informative)
If you have Mandrake 9.2, it should be possible to install it there as well.
A question for Audacity users.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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..
Re:A question for Audacity users.. (Score:4, Informative)
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Debian Woody packages? (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried replacing "potato" with "woody" in the apt source URL, but to no avail.
-bill!
(yes, yes, I know about apt-pinning
Good, but not good enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
(I did a lot of the real-time audio work)
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Windows, too (Score:5, Insightful)
comparing the wrong things (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:comparing the wrong things (Score:4, Informative)
For that, though, you've got tons of options in Linux. Specimen [gazuga.net], 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
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Re:Linux On The Desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Plugins are working fine in Linux, with LAPSDA (Score:5, Informative)
http://rpm.nyvalls.se/sound9.2.html
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Re:Whats this? Freshmeat? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Mass converters? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:Is Audacity JACK-aware? Will it be? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Audacity Rocks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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