FOSSPicks

Audio editor

Audacity 2.2.0

Audacity is the audio editing equivalent of Gimp. It's an open source cornerstone in both its breadth of functionality and as a flag bearer for the capabilities of open source. Like Gimp, Audacity shows that Free Software is a viable alternative to costly proprietary software, in that it can be used as a drop-in replacement for costly alternatives. Before Audacity, there wasn't even a low-cost alternative. If you wanted to edit and process audio with any precision, then musicians, podcasters, audio engineers, and desktop audio tinkerers had to either spend money or use much more primitive tools. Audacity has changed all that, and you can now find it on the Mac OS and Windows desktops of successful producers, alongside those of us still producing audio and playing with analog synthesizers on Linux.

But Audacity isn't perfect. In particular, its user interface has more in common with the late 1990s than the 21st century. Its audio processing also suffers from being from the same era, allowing you to apply an audio effect only after selecting a range, listening to a preview, and clicking Apply, rather than letting you create your own virtual effects rack that you can change in real time. Outside of these shortcomings, Audacity allows you to edit audio right down to the individual samples, from simple mono recordings to multitrack audio on different lanes recorded at high bit depth and high frequencies.

Thankfully, this major update attempts to redress some of Audacity's shortcomings, in particular, by incorporating four user interface themes designed for the Dark Audacity project, alongside links to the help documentation embedded within many of the application's dialogs. The help links go hand-in-hand with a fully revised manual, which will help many new users understand the sometimes dark art (and relatively inaccessible world) of audio editing. The new themes work well in the dark environments favored by many recent digital audio workstations and look much fresher than the bright grey of the original. Another major addition is MIDI playback and editing. Although MIDI files are used to produce sound, they're completely different from audio files. They're analogous to vector images versus pixel data, containing note, pitch, and instrument data rather than the raw samples.

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