Audacity 1.2.0 Released 329
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."
Finally (Score:5, Informative)
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: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
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!
Mandrake package available (Score:5, Informative)
If you have Mandrake 9.2, it should be possible to install it there as well.
Re:Fedora (Score:1, Informative)
http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/planetccrma/softw
using apt.
Re:still lack vital ui feature? (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:I think we agree (Score:2, Informative)
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...
Re:Plugins are working fine in Linux, with LAPSDA (Score:5, Informative)
http://rpm.nyvalls.se/sound9.2.html
Re:A question for Audacity users.. (Score:4, Informative)
incredibly useful (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Most important questions... (Score:3, Informative)
No, it doesn't have an automatic declick function - and declicking manually is no fun.
Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:3, Informative)
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).
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.
Re:Debian Woody packages? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Rock on Linux!!! (Score:3, Informative)
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).
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.
Re:Rock on Linux!!! (Score:2, Informative)
The others are flinging around other cool Linux audio apps, allow me to mention one more.
GNU Lilypond [lilypond.org], simply the sweetest music typesetting package ever made. It is very very amazing.
Re:The state of Linux content production software (Score:2, Informative)
Wiki ClickPop entry (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Good, but not good enough (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:3, Informative)
Not only is the $90 SM57 the world standard for recording guitar cabinets, Michael Jackson used it for lead vocals on Thriller (spare the jokes its a kickass record). Of course a nice mic pre can be very pricey, but in a pinch use your mixer's pre and be done with it.
I'll take great musicians through crappy equipment over the inverse any day.
Re:!Cool! (Score:3, Informative)
For spectrum analysis, go View->Plot Spectrum. There's also spectrum view mode, which you can select from any track's menu. Envelope editing is built in to the interface; just choose the envelope tool and start dragging points.
We definitely could use some more effects though. The most impressive ones right now are noise removal, and change pitch/tempo/speed.
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
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
Re:Linux On The Desktop (Score:3, Informative)
I think CoolEdit and its successor Adobe Audition are slicker, more mature products, but Audacity does a lot of the same basic audio editing stuff natively in Linux, and it's only getting more powerful. I've been using 1.2rc1 for several months and I love the new effects that have been implemented. For example, it's great to be able to highlight a section of a track and change the pitch. Now I have to believe you can do that in CoolEdit 2000 but it's not obvious to me how.
As for installing Linux, you should have your mom check out recent versions of Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc., which come with slick, user-friendly installers that anyone can operate. Debian is more geared toward the hobbyist/techie/professional class of users.
Re:Good, but not good enough (Score:4, Informative)
(I did a lot of the real-time audio work)
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.
Re:Good, but not good enough (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:!Cool! (Score:3, Informative)
Audacity has built-in amplification envelopes with linear-dB interpolation - i.e. fades that don't suck. You can also use built-in or plug-in effects for other types of fades. It has lots of spectrum analysis, including a spectrogram display and a frequency plot window.
And Audacity does have VST support - but currently it's limited because the VST SDK does not let us distribute the source code to it, which means that we can't integrate it directly into Audacity. Right now quite a few VST effects plug-ins work, without their GUI, and hopefully soon we will have full VSTGUI support and support for more advanced VST plug-ins, too.
Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer
Re: try goldwave too (Score:2, Informative)
I use it for making MP3's of sermons for our church website. Nice features at a great cost.
Re:this is good for OSS (Score:3, Informative)
This is available with the Equalizer effect. I agree, it's a little confusing. These effects will be merged in a future version.
Please add your other ideas to the Audacity Feature Requests [audacityteam.org] page!
Dominic
Audacity Lead Developer
Re:Is Audacity JACK-aware? Will it be? (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:3, Informative)
By the way, my sister is in college and they're teaching audio recording 101 with....Audacity. Congratulations, I think that's very noteworthy. I didn't mean to put your efforts down in my post.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe it's just me, but where's the frickin' download link?
The Audacity homepage is http://audacity.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]. There are nice, big, download links there.
The Audacity Wiki [audacityteam.org] is a community-maintained site for organizing information and resources relating to Audacity. It's publicly editable, so if you want to put download links there, you're welcome to do so!
Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:1, Informative)
record ALL TRACKS at full volume / best dynamic range, THEN in editing you adjust levles, mix, etc..
only fools do it by hand.
Re:Hopefully studio costs going down (Score:2, Informative)
The SM 57 and 58 are pretty much the default for live sound; one is for vocals, one for instruments, the same core but different housing that affects the frequency response. (I'm not an audio engineer, but in addition to occasionally playing out at bars and such I've been helping set up sound at the Free Spirit Festival for the past few years, so I've started to pay attention to these things.) You can get them for around $60 used.
For those not familiar with mics: these are dynamic mics, which are basically teeny tiny generators - a moving coil generates current. This means that your microphone has to be an energy source.
In a condenser mics, OTOH, you're moving one plate of a capacitor (condenser == capacitor), changing capacitance and thus impedence to your AC signal. That plate is typically lighter than a coil, so condensor mics track the air pressure changes - the sound - better, with wider-range and flatter frequency response and better transient response. The price is that you have to supply power ("phantom power") to it.
You can pay as much as you want to for a condensor mic :-). I have an AKG C1000 [akgusa.com] which is affordable (under $200), can power itself of an internal 9V battery, and is rugged enough to cart around. It definitely has a brighter, cleaner sound than my SM 57/58s, and I'll probably be using it when I record my CD later this year. (My resolutions for this year: 1. get a story or poem published, 2. make a CD of my original songs.)
Audacity uses the wxWidgets toolkit (Score:3, Informative)
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!