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."

Fedora

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

Re:Audacity Rocks

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.

Slashdot math...

2004-2000 = ~ 2 years

Re:Slashdot math...

You big-endian biggot.

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

(j/k)

Re:Slashdot math...

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...

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

Finally

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

Hopefully studio costs going down

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

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

Re:Hopefully studio costs going down

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

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

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

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

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

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

" ... 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

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).

Linux On The Desktop

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

Re:Linux On The Desktop

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.

The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

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

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

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

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

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

Re:The world of Out Of Phase Stereo

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

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.

still lack vital ui feature?

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:Good point!

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.

!Cool!

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!

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!

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!

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.

Rock on Linux!!!

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 [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 ... Very interesting.

Re:Rock on Linux!!!

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

The state of Linux content production software

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 [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).

Sweet!!!

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...

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

Most important questions...

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

this is good for OSS

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

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

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

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.

Mandrake package available

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.

Plugins

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

Re:Plugins are working fine in Linux, with LAPSDA

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

A question for Audacity users..

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..

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.

Debian Woody packages?

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 )

Praise the Audacity team!

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

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

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

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)

Great recorder too

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.

Windows, too

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.

WMA to MP3 support?

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).

Minor nit - stops audio when launched in OS X

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.

Rezound

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

Why I Like Audacity

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.

For Windows Users Only

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

The "Entry Level," Audacity and GarageBand

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 [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.

It's a multitrack editor

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

Scott in NC

Is Audacity JACK-aware? Will it be?

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:Is Audacity JACK-aware? Will it be?

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

Nightmare for equipment brokers, wet dream for us

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 :-)

Sound Forge?

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

It's Getting Somewhere...

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.

dealing with lots of files

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

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.

great for creating .wav phone ringers ;)

.. 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..

Audacity uses the wxWidgets toolkit

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! :-)

comparing the wrong things

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

Duh, Ardour isn't a sampler, either.

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 ...

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

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

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

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!

Re:Mass converters?

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

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

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?

Freshmeat? What's an omelette [slashdot.org] without some fresh meat?

Re:Whats this? Freshmeat?

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?

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

Re:Mass converters?

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.