I just descovered Audacity, an open source audio editor for Windows, Mac and Linux. I’ve been using Goldwave for a long time, and Adobe Audition V1 a little, but Audacity looks like it has features and a UI paradigm that I like better.
Goldwave doesn’t cost much the first time, but it hasn’t really moved much over the past many years and the major updates cost.
Adobe Audition is very functional, but very expensive. and updates are costly as well.
My friend is converting some of her cassette tapes to CDs and MP3s and I’ve taught her to use Goldwave. But with Goldwave you have to pre-create your audio file to record to. How long should you create your file? With Audacity you can just start recording. While the interface is different from Goldwave, she should have little problems in doing the transition to Audacity. I’ll see how she likes it.
Audacity also looks like it has some cool features for amateur musicians:
- Lay down multiple tracks.
- Label the parts of the tracks.
- Slide the tracks in time to align with each other.
- Set mono tracks to left or right channel.
If I knew more about the requirements of a home studio I would be more helpful in looking at these features. More later as we try it out.
– windy
Windy Weather 