Hacker News Reader

Comment by csmpltn | Hacker News Reader

Can anybody recommend an Audition alternative that does not require a monthly subscription to use?

I'm a little bit in the music production scene, and literally never see or hear anyone uses Audition. Not on posts on reddit, not on tutorials on YT. On it's wikipedia page it says that it's a DAW (and not exclusively an editing station), so the best and most popular DAWs today are those that have been so for the last two decades: Cubase, Pro-tools, Logic, Ableton. The first three have top notch audio editing capabilities, and none of them require a subscription.

Audition isn't really a music-production DAW - in fact, it doesn't even support MIDI or VST generator plugins. It's mostly an audio recorder and editing software for movie dialogue, game audio, podcasts etc.

Audacity then. It was open source until they got sold.

It's still open source.

Audacity is audio Notepad. That it runs everywhere is a plus; on the other hand, it's super clunky, it doesn't act like any other DAW, and its editing behaviors are well behind the curve.

I use Logic Pro for most things and have a dedicated, old Mac to run it, but Reaper is quite good and like $60 if one's on Windows or Linux (and isn't nearly as inscrutable as Ardour). Ableton Live is another stand-by and it runs on a Mac.

But in 2022 it's hard to recommend Audacity for much of anything, even aside from their drama problems.

Audition used to be Cool Edit Pro. I really loved the UI of that program back in the day. I don't know what it's like these days, but back then (either the late 90s or the early 2000s, I can't quite remember) it was great as a wave file editor and a multi-track mixer.

Ninja'd - was about to write the same but hit refresh beforehand. Syntrillium's Cool Edit Pro did have a multi-track recording and arrangement view, it was no longer a purely sample-based editor (Cool Edit 2000 and earlier did not have this feature, IIRC).

I also don't know how it has changed when it got taken over.

Actually pretty similar. Incremental changes build up over time but getting comfortable would take minutes, not hours.

Thanks. I'm mostly interested in the audio analysis workflows. Spectrum/frequency analysis, stereo/spatial analysis, chirp generation, perhaps basic additive synthesis capabilities (ability to generate waves with shape and frequency). Less interested on the DAW side (MIDI, Sequencing, VSTs, etc). The DAWs you've mentioned there are generally great, but are often less geared towards the workflows I'm after...

IZotope Ozone/Rx are on sale this weekend

I've always used it for voice over recording which it is good at.

Fairlight inside Blackmagic’s Davinci Resolve. Completely free.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fai...

Reaper. Seriously, it's amazing and solid and professional. Do a few tutorials to figure out its quirks and you are set for life.

https://www.reaper.fm

There are many "Audition alternatives", but it's hard to recommend anything without knowing what you want it for. Audacity might be OK if your needs are very basic. Pro-tools is kind of the industry standard DAW. Reaper is sort-of-free and quite popular. Ardour is FLOSS and good (although with paid binaries). Izotope RX9 is brilliant for cleaning up audio clips. Mixbus is supposed to have a great emulation of classic analogue mixers. Hindenburg is popular with podcasters. Etc.

I might add that if you’re looking purely for a sample editor, so no multitrack, on OS X, Twistedwave for me feels closest to the CoolEdit I grew up on. Audacity’s is probably the first one to try because FLOSS. I struggle with its UI at times—although maybe they’ve implemented scroll to zoom since I last tried it. And I don’t like how everything’s conceptualised as a ‘project’ that needs to be exported, even when working on a single file. I just want to open a file, modify and save it. Gimp made a similar mistake at some point…

For simple audio track editing (not music production), use one of the forks of Audacity. Audacity started going spooky by adding telemetry and age restrictions. Good ones are Tenacity [1], and Audacium [2].

For music production, I've been using Studio One [3] for the last couple years, and it's truly the mosf straightforward and beautiful DAW I've ever used. Though, it's not free and open source, which is a downside for me. It's one of the few proprietary software I care to own.

Zrythm [4], however, has been catching my eye lately, and I'm looking forward to it maturing to the point where I can finally move to a FOSS DAW.

[1] https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity [2] https://github.com/SartoxSoftware/audacium [3] https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-One [4] https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html

I used audition before it was bought by adobe, and it was a very good audio editor. But today, almost anything is better than audition. A wonderful, if a bit ugly and “raw” DAW is Reaper. I use it for everything. The big contenders are Ableton Live and Apple Logic Pro. A lot of people, that create music, are using them. I like reaper the most because it is nimble and is still pretty complete.

Not knowing your specific use case, I use Reaper as my DAW, I'm a voice actor.

No subscription required, very reasonable pricing.

* FL Studio

* Ableton Live

* Reaper

Try Audacity?

I don‘t think Audacity is a great option anymore [0][1]. You might want to consider one of the forks (e.g. [2]).

[0]: https://hackaday.com/2021/07/13/muse-group-continues-tone-de...

[1]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-audacity-how-to-wre...

[2]: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity

Unfortunately Tenacity has mostly dropped off in commit activity. I wish it had taken off though.

Such an overblown issue IMO. And it was all rolled back anyway. They're actually trying really hard to improve audacity. Yes a few missteps happened but the backlash was way out of proportion, especially given how approachable and responsive they were about all the negative feedback. If they had stonewalled the community and told them to fuck off it would've been a different story but that is most certainly not what happened.

> Yes a few missteps happened but the backlash was way out of proportion, especially given how approachable and responsive they were about all the negative feedback.

This has become standard operating procedure. Push your agenda until you receive backlash, then claim it was all a big misunderstanding, and that you are listening to feedback. Let things calm down for a few months, then push the controversial changes anyway.

People are picking up on that, and won‘t accept it anymore. I think that‘s great.

Current leadership has shown their hand and the probable long-term direction they are headed.

Maybe it‘s an honest mistake, but the community no longer seems to extend the benefit of the doubt, which is totally understandable. Fool me 42753 times, shame on me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com