Gone are the days when you’d have to pay a pretty penny for a decent sound editing and mixing application. For the best part of a decade, Audacity has carved a niche for itself as a powerful, yet usable tool for sound editing. It’s capable of recording live audio, digitising your old vinyl and cassette collection, editing a wide range of audio formats (including Ogg Vorbis, AIFF, WAV and MP3).
Chocolatey is software management automation for Windows that wraps installers, executables, zips, and scripts into compiled packages. Chocolatey integrates w/SCCM, Puppet, Chef, etc. Chocolatey is trusted by businesses to manage software deployments. Download Audacity for Windows to record, digitize, import, export, edit, combine, preview, and analyze multi-track sound files. Audacity has had 2 updates within the past 6 months. The optional FFmpeg library allows Audacity to import and export a much larger range of audio formats including M4A (AAC), AC3, AMR (narrow band) and WMA and also to import audio from most video files. Because of software patents, Audacity cannot include the FFmpeg software or distribute it from its own websites. Instead, use the following instructions to download and install the free. Product Name: Audacity® Product Version: 2,1,2,0; Short description. Audacity is an audio editor that benefits from being open source rather than proprietary. Whether it is basic editing or some format transfers that are required, Audacity is as good a piece of software up for the task than any other on the market. The user interface is.
The interface also makes it easy to cut, copy, splice and mix sounds together, alter a recording’s speech or pitch, plus apply various filters to cut out distortion or introduce special effects. In fact, Audacity is so versatile, you’ll often find it bundled with hardware devices such as ION’s range of turntables.
For a number of years Audacity has been available in two separate versions: an elderly, stable 1.2.6 release that doesn’t work on newer versions of OS X and Windows, and a long-running beta series that reached version 1.3.14 before it finally morphed into this, Audacity 2.0, more than six years after it first appeared.
That’s right, Audacity 2 is little more than a stable version of the long-running beta That means if you’re currently running the latest version of the beta you won’t see anything radically different from what you’ve been used to by upgrading to version 2.0. However, it’s worth upgrading to for one critical reason: it’s an official, stable release.
If you’ve religiously stuck with version 1.2.6, or are running an older 1.3.x beta build, then you’ll find there are plenty of reasons to update, from interface tweaks like improved toolbar docking, the ability to have multiple clips per track (while collapsing or expanding tracks in the workspace), repair and equalization effects, timer recording, improved drag and drop, plus project saving and recovery.
Note: while Audacity can import MP3 files, you will need to download and install the LAME MP3 Encoder plug-in if you wish to export your recordings in MP3 format.
Audacity 2.0.4
Verdict:
Audacity 2.0.3 Manual
An essential download for those looking for a powerful audio recording, editing and mixing tool.