As far as open source audio editors go, they are few and far between. So much so that there really is only one of them to consider:

Audacity.

It’s been stable and functional for some time now, to the tune of 2 or 3 years. Its important to note that there is further beta development at version 1.3.6 which I have not looked at yet. For now I’ll concentrate on the stable release.

It’s cross platform, (mac ,*nix, and pc), it looks good in windows, and it works very very well. It does everything a sound editor could want. You save to any codec supported by your OS, you can fade, edit, resample, upsample, downsample, and it even supports multitracking, although it’s no substititue for Acid. It supports most formats, but notably not AAC or WMA. Considering that these are both proprietary, platform dependant and DRM’ed formats this is probably a good thing. No good can come of DRM, but that is another story - see my DRM musing here. It does support the important ones: MP3, MPEG, and OGG (and WAV of course).

It is stable - I successfully edited and resampled a number of audio tracks rendered from audio software at 96Khz 24bit.

It supports VST effects and LADSPA effects although the stability of these plugins of course is plugin dependant. I didnt get the chance to try an VST effects, but then, most of the effects you would need are already available as standard.

Where Audacity shines is for recording; If you want a flexible, powerful, function packed free alternative to windows sound recorder without the length limit, you have come to the right place. If you have recorded a voiceover for example in windows movie maker and its too quiet, export it to a WAV, edit it with audacity to compress it, and remove the hiss. Or re-record with the far more functional VU meters and visual display, for a better finish.

There’s really not much more I can say - its very good, and its soon going to get better. My recommendation though? Stick with the stable releases.

J

written by Pensive