The Audacity Audio Editor [LWN.net]

Audacity is a GUI-based audio editor. It is a cross-platform project with versions for Linux/Unix, Mac OS-X, and Windows. It has been built with the wxWidgets GUI framework, and is written with a combination of C and C++ code. Audacity has been released under the Gnu GPL.

The project description gives a brief description of Audacity's capabilities: [Audacity]

You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Echo, Change Tempo, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST and LADSPA plug-in effects.

The Audacity Screenshots page shows the program in action, it is fairly easy to figure out, with standard tape recorder buttons and an oscilloscope-style sound file display.

Version 1.2.2 of Audacity was released this week.

Audacity 1.2.2 is a new stable version of the free Audacity sound editor. This release includes new features such as level meters, multi-file export, and lower latency for multi-track recording. It also includes many bug fixes.

The addition of the record/playback level meter is an essential feature for the use of Audacity as a serious recording program. Apparently, it is also possible to record a new track while playing back another, this is a feature that is missing from many audio recording utilities, yet is of critical importance to most musician-users. The Audacity FAQ discusses some of the difficulties involved with multi-tracking.

Audacity features several online Tutorials to assist the user in learning its capabilities.

Audacity is available for download here. Dependencies include wxWidgets 2.4, and optionally MAD (Mpeg Audio Decoder), Ogg Vorbis, and LAME.

Audacity appears to be a fairly active project with a lot of development and a focus on adding useful features. It should be considered for any Linux audio enthusiast's collection of tools.

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