Audacity digital editing software

Audacity logoAudacity is the name of a free digital audio editing software package distributed by Sourceforge. It is distributed under Version 2 of GPL without exceptions.   It does require a .mp3 plug-in to generate mp3 files.  According to the Sourceforge website:

Audacity was started by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg in the fall of 1999 at Carnegie Mellon University. It was released as open-source software at SourceForge.net in May of 2000…

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

  • Record live audio.
  • Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
  • Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
  • Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
  • Change the speed or pitch of a recording.

The full list of features is available here.

So, I have downloaded a copy and installed it on my test machine in the basement (hardware requirements here).  My test machine is a stripped-out P4 2.4 GHz Windows XP box that I can isolate from the network and experiment with.  On that machine with a digigram VX-880 soundcard, Audacity did very well.  I did not record multi-track, but with 24-bit sound sampled at 48 KHz, the computer kept up nicely.  The basic editing features are intuitive and easy to manipulate with a mouse and keypad.

For a quick-to-install downloadable program, it does very well.  Does it do everything like Adobe Audition or other professional editing software suite does? No.  But for the price, it can’t be beat.