I thought this would be a good time to give an update and abit of an analysis of the software we are using. Firstly in our last couple of lessons we have managed to record our national headlines,the main story(minus vox pop due to illness) and the sports section and all together we have roughly 2 minutes of our broadcast done still left to do is vox pops, weather and local headlines. i am confident we can get all these aspects of the show recorded and edited by our deadline.
Audacity:
Audacity is a free software, cross-platform digital audio editor and recording application. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD.
Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University.
Mazzoni now works at Google, but is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world.
The latest release of Audacity is 1.3.12, a beta, released on 1 April 2010.[8] As of 29 October 2010, it was the 10th most popular download from SourceForge.net, with 72 million downloads. Audacity won the SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia.
features of audacity:
- Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME encoder, downloaded separately), Ogg Vorbis, all file formats supported by libsndfile library
- Versions 1.2.5 and 1.3.2 and later also support Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)[11]
- Version 1.3.6 and later also support additional formats such as WMA, AAC, AMR and AC3 via the optional FFmpeg library
- Recording and playing sounds
- Editing via Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo)
- Multitrack mixing
- A large array of digital effects and plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist
- Amplitude envelope editing
- Noise removal
- Audio spectrum analysis using the Fourier transformation algorithm
- The ability to make precise adjustments to the audio's speed while maintaining pitch (Audacity calls it changing tempo), in order to synchronize it with video, run for the right length of time, etc
- The ability to change the audio's pitch without changing the speed
- Contains major features of modern multi-track audio software[12] including navigation controls, zoom and single track edit, project pane and XY project navigation, non-destructive and destructive effect processing, audio file manipulation (cut, copy, paste)
- Converting cassette tapes or records into digital tracks by automatically splitting one track into multiple tracks based on silences in the track and the export multiple option
- Multi-platform: works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix-like systems (including Linux and BSD), among others
- The latest stable version supports Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista, but Windows 95 and NT are not supported. Windows 7 support is still provisional. For Windows 7, the developers recommend the latest 1.3.x Beta[13]
- Audacity uses the wxWidgets software library to provide a similar graphical user interface on several different operating systems.
- Audacity can also be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts. It can be used for finishing podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out.
It is currently used in the OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit.
Despite its positives i have discovered 3 weeknesses:
- Audacity lacks dynamic equalizer controls, real time effects and support for scrubbing
- A plug-in is required for VST plug-ins in Audacity 1.2.x
- MIDI files can only be displayed
Here are some reviews from users these were found on http://www.snapfiles.com/
Interface: 5 Features: 5 Ease of use: 5 Value: 5 Overall: 5 out of 5
Amazingly powerful audio file editor. ... Supports input/output of WAV, Ogg, FLAC, MP3, MP2, AC3 and about a dozen others, plus allows writing audio tags with each file. ... Excellent list of plug-ins and filters. Very powerful, easy-to-use, supports virtually unlimited number of tracks. The best audio editor I've seen, not that I've seen every single piece of software in existence, but this is awfully hard to beat !
Interface: 1 Features: 3 Ease of use: 1 Value: 5 Overall: 2 out of 5
I know by far this is a good program, but lacks too much on help and guidance. Sound issues are not easy, and the programs doesn't helps too mucho. I.E.: after installing, no sound recording device were detected. No info on website, confusing info in forums, confusing screen captures (using same version!) menus just disappear (apart from the old looking GUI) It would be nice to have some contextual help and recommendations, i.e. frequency rate? how do I know which settings are good for the job I'm doing? (some hours googling it...)Some other issues, wav files does not behave like normal wav files. A lot of good intentions, there's a lot of people enjoying this program, but any time I use it, I have a lot of troubles. You may need a PhD in Audacity... I do not get the point.
Interface: 3 Features: 4 Ease of use: 3 Value: 5 Overall: 4 out 5
Although it's not listed as working under Vista, it has performed very well on my Compaq while editing very large mp3 files. I tried other editing software, some were shareware with free trial time, and their asking prices were from $29 to $99 and they did not perform as well as Audacity! Thank you for such a great program!
These range of reviews led me to decide to write my own review on the website:
Interface: 4 Features: 4 Ease of use: 4 Value: 5 Overall:4.5 out of 5
Have been using this for a while without too many problems. It does have limitations when playing back edited portions of music in that it plays such a small section of your changes you don't get a feel for how the changes will come out. Thank goodness for the undo function. I still use this as a main tool for editing wav files, In particular the editing of wave files taken from records. I have found it useful for this due to the click removal tool which is quite effective. For a free program this is a nice piece of software. I would highly recommend this to anyone who needs to do some wave editing and converting.
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