Is Audacity useful?

[mathman]

Hi everyone, recently a friend of mine showed me audacity for recording pretty much anything. I liked it a lot but I wanted to make sure this wasn't just some sort of outdated technology and that I was using the best available.

I plan to be doing A LOT of recording over the coming months so I would really appreciate if someone had some insight on this question. Thanks!

[John Willett]

Audacity is a great free program.

However, if you are going to do lots of recording, I would go for a good program that will see you into the future.

I use Samplitude / Sequoia - I started with Samplitude and grew into Sequoia (the top version) over the years. The latest edition - Samplitude 12 is released in September. I think that any copies of Samplitude 11 bought now include a free upgrade to 12.

Upgrades are free for the lifetime of the version you have and you get a discount when you upgtade to a new version (IE: buy 12 and 12.1, 12.2, etc. are free and you pay about 25% of the price when you get 13 in a couple of years time).

You can download a free trial version from the page I linked to above.

[Mike Stranks]

Just wanted to confirm what John has said about Audacity. It's very good and a great introduction to multitrack recording and mixing. However, I eventually found that some of the stuff I wanted to do was difficult or not possible in Audacity, but for what it is it's great.

I also agree with John that it you're planning to do a lot of recording then it might be an idea to spend some money on a product that you like and gives you everything and more than you think you'll want. There are lots of programmes around and much depends on your budget. Cockos 'Reaper' is a firm favourite around here and with good reason. The good news is that many of theses programmes (Digital Audio Workstations) have trial versions and tutorials (often via YouTube) so you can get a good idea of facilities and usablity before you part with any cash.

Good luck and have fun!

[Folderol]

Where Audacity really comes into its own is if you need to do a quick 'top & tail' of a recording or separate out individual tracks. It is very quick to start up and use, cross platform, and low on resource usage.

[Exalted Wombat]

Hi everyone, recently a friend of mine showed me audacity for recording pretty much anything. I liked it a lot but I wanted to make sure this wasn't just some sort of outdated technology and that I was using the best available.

I plan to be doing A LOT of recording over the coming months so I would really appreciate if someone had some insight on this question. Thanks!

If Audacity has the facilities required to do what you need to do, the result will sound just as good as from any other program.

As long as you save your work uncompressed as wav files, they will transfer with no quality loss into another program if and when you need further facilities.

Use Audacity until you need more functions. That's all it's about, not better quality.

[Bob Moose]

Use Audacity until you need more functions. That's all it's about, not better quality.

Or until you need a different user interface / workflow

-j

[dubbmann]

hi,

i've got audacity downloaded on several different computers and while i like the software itself, the achilles' heal is the h/w support. i have it running on three different PCs all w/t WinXP and different audio h/w (MOTU 2408s on two, Tascam US-224 the third) and it doesn't work correctly on any of them. i even got MOTU tech support in on out (they were very helpful, i want to add) and they got it working on their test machines running XP but for me still no joy.

the good news, it only costs you the download time and the effort to install to find out if it works w/ your h/w. if it does, great; if not, hey, it was free.

cheers,

d

[mc23]

I have used and been really impressed with the "Noise Removal" effect
in Audacity.

It allows you to Select and Sample the noise from the recording and
then subtract this from the track.

The choice of the "sample noise" is clearly very important, but for my
task of trying to improve some old tape recordings was very very good!

Cheers
- Mike

[ef37a]

I "think" I might have a problem with new W764 laptop and ZED10usb and Audacity but I am not sure yet.

But yes, great progg' and one of the few sources I have found of pink noise.

Dave.

[Daniel Davis]

And another thing...

I use Logic 8 - but recently I've been doing some mixing for a client who had recorded on another system. He sent the files as 32-bit floating-point files which Logic can't read.

Import all the tracks into audacity, set the file format to 24-bit fixed and export. In 2 minutes I'm ready to go in Logic.

Now can someone explain why a free program can do this and Logic can't (perhaps its been included in version 9 - I can't comment on that).

[anotherDutchy]

Where Audacity really comes into its own is if you need to do a quick 'top & tail' of a recording or separate out individual tracks. It is very quick to start up and use, cross platform, and low on resource usage.

Exactly, I find it works best as a quick way to look into audio files or convert formats. I wouldn't use it for recording a composition, but to work on single wave manipulations. If I was doing editing on a musical level, I'd do it in the DAW though.