| Audacity: the open source podcasting program of choice |
Mar. 28, 2006
At first, I was ticked off to see that Johnathon Williams has beaten me to reviewing Audacity, the outstanding, open-source audio-editing software for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
You see Audacity is a great little program for podcasting and I use it myself for my Cyber Cynic podcasts. It's not just me, the open-source guy -- all of us at eWEEK, Linux-Watch, and Microsoft Watch use Audacity.
How good is it?
We recently used it to make a roundtable podcast on a conference line on which five of us, including yours truly, hashed out the impact of the Vista and Office delays on the Windows community, developers, and enterprise buyers, and what it all means for Linux and Mac OS X. Without Audacity, or a professional audio engineer, I don't know we could have done it.
But, boy, am I glad that Williams beat me to looking at Audacity in his NewsForge article, Mastering podcasts with Audacity.
You see, he knows, more, a lot more, than I do about how to get the most out of Audacity. I'd have looked like an idiot, had I gotten my naive review of the program out first. While I've often looked like a moron, I'd just as soon avoid it when I can.
Still, there are a few things I can point out.
One of my favorite Audacity features has nothing to do with podcasting. With the program, you can natively convert records and tapes into WAV, AIFF, AU, and Ogg Vorbis digital formats. With the optional LAME encoder library, you can also export to MP3. If you can get a sound into your PC, whether by microphone, line input, whatever, you can record it.
While there are lots of programs that can turn your older recordings into digital formats, I've found most of them to be more trouble than they were worth. With Audacity, I finally found a program that's easy to use, makes it simple to remove static, hiss, and hum from my old LPs, and is open source, to boot.
Now, there may be better "do-it-all" audio recording and editing software out there. In fact, I'm sure there is for recording engineers. But, for most users, most of the time, Audacity is the best of the best.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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