Audacity
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 Audacity 1.3.4 beta on Ubuntu |
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| Developed by | The Audacity Team |
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| Initial release | May 2000[1] |
| Stable release | 1.2.6 (2006-11-15) [+/−] |
| Preview release | 1.3.7 BETA (2009-01-27) [+/−] |
| Written in | C and C++ (using the wxWidgets toolkit)[2][3] |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | over 20 languages |
| Type | Digital audio editor |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | audacity.sourceforge.net |
Audacity is a digital audio editor and recording application. Audacity is cross-platform and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD.
Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. Mazzoni now works at Google, but is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world.
The latest stable release of Audacity is 1.2.6, released on 15 November 2006. As of 30 Jan 2009, it was the 8th most popular download from SourceForge.net, with over 54 million downloads.[4] Audacity won the SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia.[5] Audacity is free software and is licensed under the GNU General Public License version two, but may update to GPLv3 after version 1.4.0.[6]
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[edit] Features
Some of Audacity's features include:
- Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME encoder, downloaded separately), Ogg Vorbis, all file formats supported by libsndfile library
- Version 1.3.2 also supports Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)
- Recording and playing sounds
- Editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (with unlimited Undo)
- Multi-track mixing
- A large array of digital effects and plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist
- Amplitude envelope editing
- Noise removal
- Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 24 bits per sample
- The ability to make precise adjustments to the audio's speed while maintaining pitch (Audacity calls it changing tempo), in order to synchronize it with video, run for the right length of time, etc.
- The ability to change the audio's pitch without changing the speed.
- Contains major features of modern multi-track audio software [7] including navigation controls, zoom and single track edit, project pane and XY project navigation, non-destructive and destructive effect processing, audio file manipulation (cut, copy, paste)
- Converting cassette tapes or records into digital tracks by automatically splitting one wav (or the other supported types) track into multiple tracks based on silences in the track and the export multiple option.
- Multi-platform: works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix-like systems (including GNU/Linux and BSD) amongst others.
- The latest versions support Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista, but Windows 95 and NT are not supported.[8]
- Audacity uses the wxWidgets software library to provide a similar graphical user interface on several different operating systems.
Audacity can also be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts. It can be used for finishing podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out.[9]
It is currently used in the OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit.
[edit] Limitations
A plug-in is required for VST plug-ins[10]. Audacity lacks dynamic equalizer controls, real time effects and support for scrubbing.[11] MIDI files can only be loaded visually.[12]
A limitation to the Audacity is its inability to easily move around audio files in a non-linear fashion.[13].
[edit] Language support
In addition to English language help, the ZIP file of the downloadable Audacity software program includes help files for Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Welsh in its user interface. A partial Bengali help file is also included.
The Audacity website also provides tutorials in languages other than English.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "Audacity: Credits". http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/credits. Retrieved on 2008-08-15.
- ^ SourceForge (July 2004). "Project of the Month July 2004 - Audacity". http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2004-07.php. Retrieved on 2008-11-27.
- ^ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2004). "E-Commerce and Development Report 2004". http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/ecdr2004ch3_en.pdf. Retrieved on 2008-11-27.
- ^ "SourceForge.net: All-Time Top Downloads". http://sourceforge.net/top/topalltime.php?type=downloads. Retrieved on 2009-01-30.
- ^ "SourceForge.net: 2007 Community Choice Awards". http://sourceforge.net/community/index.php/landing-pages/cca07/. Retrieved on 2008-01-19.
- ^ "Nabble - Re: [Audacity-translation New GPL. Now which GPL?"]. http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A--Audacity-translation--New-GPL.-Now-which-GPL--t4064947.html#a11550030. Retrieved on 2008-01-19.
- ^ [1]
- ^ Audacity (undated). "Audacity - Windows". http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/windows. Retrieved on 2008-10-11.
- ^ "Podcasting with Linux Command Line Tools and Audacity". http://www.packtpub.com/article/podcasting-with-linux-command-line-tools-and-audacity. Retrieved on 2008-01-19.
- ^ FAQ:Installation and Plug-Ins - Audacity Manual
- ^ Audacity Projcet (November 2008). "Audacity Feature Requests". http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Feature_Requests. Retrieved on 2008-11-08.
- ^ Quick Guide - Audacity Manual
- ^ [2]
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Audacity |
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Wikiversity has learning materials about Audacity |
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