Audacity Audio Editing Software - Free
Audacity has all the Features most Users Need from an Audio Editor
Feb 10, 2009
Audacity is has the right mix of features to be useful to new users without bewildering them with daunting complexity of a digital audio workstation. As an entry to the world of digital audio editing it is powerful enough to perform many tasks. Even if in the end a user moves on to more full-featured commercial products, using Audacity will help them refine which features matter to them for their requirements.
Editing Audio - Cut and Paste
Many people simply need to trim their recordings - get rid of garbage from the beginning and end of their takes and cut out interruptions in the middle. Audacity makes this easy - select the unwanted piece in the timeline and delete.
This simple functionality is what podcaters, students recording lectures and journalists organising their interview notes need. Of course Audacity facilitates adjusting the volume of takes, even changing volume as the track plays, which makes fading sections in and out easy.
Editing Audio - Multitrack
Multitracking is where an number of tracks are played in parallel - this is an advanced technique mainly used for music. The tracks can be shifted in time relative to each other and faded in and out. Audacity can do this, though most computer hardware can only record two tracks at a time.
Audacity certainly is a good introduction to the complexities of multitrack recording, though commercial offerings such as Adobe Audition, Sound Forge, Steinberg Wavelab and Nuendo do offer a slicker interface and better effects facilities.
Recording with Audacity
One of the nice things about Audacity is that it can select the recording source from the program, rather than having to launch the Windows Recording Mixer (or equivalent on other platforms). This is a great help to the new user, and the defaults are helpfully set to the microphone input, and other settings like sampling rate are set to 44.1kHz. This matches CD, which is good if the recording will end up on CD or needs to be mixed with CD sourced tracks.
Launch Audacity, and the screen shown on the left-hand image below will be seen. The record button is the red dot, if pressed the computer should be recording from the microphone.The stop button is the square dot, which will stop the recording.
To play the recording press the play button (green triangle)
Record Internet Radio using Audacity
An added bonus is that Audacity makes it a breeze to record internet radio stations and other sites that do not provide a download facility. This is done by selecting Wave Out Mix instead of the Microphone, setting the Project rate to 44100 and pressing the record button.
When the selected site starts to play, what is heard through the speakers is also being recorded by Audacity until the stop button is pressed.
(Readers must check the rights associated with the streaming audio to check that recording it does not break the Terms of Use of the internet radio site in question, or international copyright laws.)
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