Audacity 2.0 Released
audacity.sourceforge.net
audacity.sourceforge.net
I'm always amazed and proud at how widely I see Audacity being used. Most recently I spent the 5 weeks as a juror on a criminal trial, and I saw Audacity installed on the prosecutor's computer.
haberman and I first met when I started contributing to Audacity more than a decade ago. Later he helped me apply for a job at Amazon.com and we became teammates. Since then we've drifted away from Audacity development, both left Amazon to work in startups, and haberman is now at Google while I ended up at Mozilla, but we are still good friends and keep in touch -- and also debate technical minutia on HN. :)
Audacity has always been short on developers for a project with such a large userbase, so development has often been slow. But the contributor community was one of the friendliest I've been involved in, thanks in large part to the great stewardship of Audacity's creator Dominic Mazzoni. If you use Audacity, please consider checking out the code and fixing a bug or two!
For any of you who have a lot of hissing or humming coming from your mic when you record podcasts or demo videos for your startups. Audacity can take it out in just a few clicks using its noise removal filter. Just remember, whenever you start recording an audio track, wait 5 seconds before you start talking, and then use those 5 seconds of hissing to build a profile using the noise removal. And apply that to the whole track. My brother and I were blown away at how well it took all the hissing out. I recorded on a $9 Walmart mike and it sounded like studio quality work. Crisp, clean voice, pure hiss-less silence between sentences.
Thank you and all of its developers. Audacity is a perfect example of easy to use, easy to learn, open source software.
Is there anyone with some design chops who can't help them out though?
Great app!
My personal use for audacity other than randomly playing around with audio stuff was to clean up a CD of a radio recording from a decade ago, that over time had picked up scratches and noise, and managed to do a pretty awesome job overall.
There may be a better way, but that's what I've always done if I needed to record on Skype.
If you (still) use an emu10kn-based card (such as the SB Live), the kX project drivers allow custom routing, mixing, and alteration of inputs and outputs via the card's built-in DSP chip.
apt-get install jackd2 brew install jackI payed for Pamela long ago; now the free version records 15 minutes. (Don't know if I can still recommend them though, now tying in TrialPay for some reason.) http://www.pamela.biz/en/products/
* Many effects significantly improved, especially Equalization, Noise Removal and Normalize. Vocal Remover now included plus GVerb on Windows and Mac. VAMP analysis plug-ins now supported.
* Improved label tracks with Sync-Lock Tracks feature in the Tracks Menu. Multiple clips per track. Tracks and selections can be fully manipulated using the keyboard. Many more keyboard shortcuts.
* New Device Toolbar to manage inputs and outputs. Timer Record feature. New Mixer Board view with per-track VU meters.
* Automatic Crash Recovery in the event of abnormal program termination.
* Fast "On-Demand" import of WAV/AIFF files if read directly from source. FLAC now fully supported. Added support for optional FFmpeg library for import/export of AC3/M4A/WMA and import of audio from video files.
This hardly seems to justify a leap from 1.3. That and the fact that selection and playback still work in the most counter-intuitive way imaginable.
Audacity uses even/odd version numbering for stable/unstable release branches, like the Linux kernel once did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#Odd-number...
So when Audacity 1.0 was released, new feature development moved to the 1.1 branch, while the 1.0 branch received only bug fixes. When the 1.1 branch was considered "finished" it became the new stable version 1.2.0, and the 1.0 branch was abandoned. Then new feature development moved to the 1.3 branch, which has now been released as the new stable version Audacity 2.0.
If I remember right, many of the major changes between the 1.1/1.2 series and the 1.3/2.0 series were under the hood, such as support for new versions of Portaudio and wxWidgets (which added compatibility for newer hardware and operating systems), improvements to the file format, and enhancements to the importers.
It's been eight years since Audacity 1.2 was released (and at least six years since 1.3 development began), and the code has seen pretty major changes in that time even though they happened gradually and not all are obvious from looking at the UI. I think it's fair to call 2.0 a major upgrade from 1.0 and 1.2.
Or to look at it another way: If you haven't changed the major version number after ten years of development, then you'll probably never change it. And if you're never going to change that number, it's redundant and you might as well drop it. (This is roughly what the Linux kernel did when it switched from 2.6.x.y to 3.x.y after fifteen years of 2.x releases.)
Maybe if you keep trying, or even look at the code and see if you can make a patch file with a few new buttons - that would result in some progress. It would be great because audacity could use some UI love.
Compare the interface to Reaper (The Cockos team has three main contributors, right?), Cubase or Vegas, or if you want to get shiny, Propellerheads or Line6.
A fresh coat of paint goes a long way.
Reaper's license only costs $225 for full commercial use exceeding $20,000 in revenue. Otherwise it's $65 for the exact same software. Not a bad deal at all.
There are people who have offered their services, presumably free of charge. I think Audacity would be a lot more inviting if more effort was put into the look and usability of the interface. Need money? Come up with a plan and a Kickstarter page.
I'm not saying it should be a DAW. I'm just saying it should look like something that was released in 2012, rather than something that was released in 1998.
Coupled with Reaper, also free if you're a big cheapo, somewhat analogously to the WinRar model, you get so much great functionality for so little.
no, wait. I could, but...
it's a pain to have to boot it up before a skype call - some earlier version would not record unless skype was loaded after AHP, for example.
I broke down and spent the whole $20 on ecamm's call recorded for skype plugin. http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder/
It works. Exceedingly well. Each side of the conversation gets recorded in to a separate channel. You can set the quality. It does video, and you can get each side of the video out as a separate vid file too.
And it's always on. I have it set to record automatically, but it'll throw it away if it's < 5 seconds. A little popup comes up with a red off button so I can stop recording on the boring calls, but by default, I'm recording.
I record most of my calls to customer service departments this way. "This call may be recorded for quality purposes" I take as them giving me permission to record the conversation, so I do.
Seems weird it's specifically GNU/Linux they support, yet they can't be dependent on GNU userland or GNU libc if they support Mac.
Also, not sure what that has to do with them having a version of their software that runs on OS X. They could easily use libraries that aren't glibc for the Mac version.
So maybe on a Linux Platform they are dependent on the GNU toolchain.