Audacity

About Audacity

Audacity is a free audio recording, editing and mixing software, distributed under the GNU GPL (General Public License). It is available on all major platforms such as Windows, MAC OS X and Linux.

Audacity has really created a great impact in a very short time due to its remarkable features, which have made users forgo many other audio editing and recording software for this. It has an easy user interface and supports 32-bit floating point audio, which makes it a simple but very useful tool for audio editors. The last thing you need for editing your audio files is to work in a mind-boggling environment, cluttered with design flaws, and you can be sure Audacity offers you no such thing. But the settings might be a bit uncomfortable, at least at the beginning.

Another remarkable fact is the size of Audacity, which is simply 15 MB for its setup file. I am impressed that this freeware uses low-memory resources. It supports various Windows versions, which means that even older PCs that are still running on older versions of the OS can benefit from the software. Although the software is very useful in producing podcasts, it is not really a publishing software. So if you need to publish them, some other software must be used.

When we launched the free audio editor for the first time, it displayed a window showing us different methods of getting help. But need to have an internet connection for help.

On the top left side of the grey user interface were familiar buttons for pausing, playing and stopping. Here are three others for recording and skipping to the start and end. Below them were sliders for selecting the respective levels of speaker, microphone and playback speed. In the middle upper section were buttons for selecting different tools, while the playback and recording levels were on the top right side.

The window displaying audio waves, either of a loaded file or the one being recorded, was in the middle section of the program window. Below them were numbers showing audio position, selection start and either end or length. It also displayed the Project rate and ‘Snap To’ option.

We could let the program use default sound and recording devices on our system or select the specific ones we wanted to use. Recording was as easy as pressing the ‘Record’ button. With the help of Audacity, you can record almost any sort of audio, and one of its many recording benefits includes digitizing analogue recordings from tape. Apart from a microphone, you can even record any sound that you can hear playing from your computer.

Although it is a good idea to make as clean a recording as possible, we did not have to worry too much about where we took our recordings because we could later apply relevant effects to improve quality. For example, we could amplify sounds and then remove noise by selecting a small section with the noise we wanted to filter to generate a noise profile.

In the second step of removing noise, we could adjust noise reduction, sensitivity, frequency smoothing and attack or delay time. We could then choose either to remove or isolate the noise.

When it comes to editing, Audacity is as good as it is in recording and offers you a variety of editing tools, which should fulfil most of your audio editing requirements. You can edit frequently used audio file types such as MP3, among many other extensions, and you can cut, copy or mix various audio file segments.

You can also edit the pitch and the tone of the audio recording. The software is equipped with a remarkable beat analyzer and a mouse zoom feature, which makes the life of an editor much easier. Whether you are looking for the noise reduction feature, cropping, fading, mixing, echo, tempo or other basic features, you will find them all in Audacity. However, it still does not feature many of the sophisticated editing features.

Under the ‘Transport’ menu, we could choose to turn ‘Overdub’ either on or off depending on whether we wanted to erase earlier tracks or create a multi-track file.

Is Audacity Free

Yes, Audacity is fully free of charge. There is no hidden cost.  No registration or hardware purchase is required. Just download – install ___________ enjoy. It is an open-source audio management software.

Advantages

• Easy-to-use free audio editor
• Real-time preview of your project
• Record live audio via the microphone
• Import, edit and combine sound files
• Export your recordings in many different audio formats
• Supports 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit sound quality
• LADSPA, LV2, Nyquist, VST, and Audio Unit plug-ins for audio effect
• Free music editor and music mixing software

How to Install Audacity?

1. Double-click on the installer
2. Select the language to use during the installation and click Next
3. In the welcome setup wizard click Next
4. Read the following license information and click Next
5. Select destination location where you want to install it and click Next
6. Leave everything at default and click Next
7. Setup is now ready to install, so click Install
8. Finally, click Finish to launch the software

Features/Interface

File

Edit

Select

View

Transport

Tracks

Generate

Effect

Analyze

Tools

Technical Details