DO YOU HAVE THE AUDICITY?
A FREE AND OPEN SOURCE AUDIO EDITING PROGRAM MAY FINALLY BE READY FOR SERIOUS USE. On August 2004, I had the unusual opportunity to spend two weeks as an artist in residence at the Full Moon Audio Art Camp in Baie Verte, New Brunswick. Removed from my usual responsibilities, I was able to play with audio production in any way I wanted to. The many computers at the camp were programmed with two audio editing programs -- neither of which I had ever used before. One was Cool Edit (now under new ownership and officially known as Adobe Audition) and the other was Audacity. Cool Edit is one of the most popular commercial sound editors. It is multi-track and has a lot of bells and whistles. You can download a 30-day trial edition from their Web site, but if you want to keep using it after the 30 days, you have to pay about US$300. By contrast, Audacity is a product of the free software movement, sometimes called the "free and open source" software movement. This is an extremely interesting trend whereby people give each other information and tools, instead of keeping them proprietary so as to make more profit. Open source refers to the fact that everybody can have access to the computational source-code behind the program. Free means that you are free to modify it however you want. In the case of Audacity, free also means free of charge, and that's an important plus for community radio. The computer programmers who work on Audacity are volunteers. Volunteers have also translated the program into a wide variety of languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, Swedish and Slovenian -- to name a few. They have also made the program able to run on any of the three major operating system platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. (Linux is an increasingly popular operating system that is itself open source.) The team is recruiting workers and they are also raising money--for a donation you can now get an Audacity T-shirt. I first heard about Audacity during a tech retreat in Santa Barbara, California (organized by the Pacifica Foundation in conjunction with the Grassroots Radio Conference). At one of our workshops, we discussed developing a recommended software and hardware list for community radio people around the world, so that it would be easier to work together across national boundaries. Ryme Khatkhouda from WPFW had used Audacity and said she would love to recommend it, but that it still had too many problems. So, when I got my hands on it at Full Moon, I was very curious to find out what was good and what was wrong with the program. If Audacity could be fixed, it could become the new international standard for our movement. The first thing I noticed about Audacity is that it is a multitrack program. SoundForge, which is the program we use most for current affairs at CJSFFM, only shows up as mono or stereo. You can mixdown different segments (although it's not simple), but you can't edit tracks independently. In that respect, Audacity is more like the other program we use at CJSF, Pro Tools. You can edit tracks separately and then play them solo or together. The first and primary problem I encountered with Audacity was that sometimes it crashed. The most embarrassing moment was when we had a visiting Girl Guide group in working on a project. After two hours, we had lost their file and were unable to recover it. (Luckily, I wasn't the one editing that time!) When I returned to Vancouver, Irma Arkus (host of Hi-Sci-Fi on CJSF-FM) suggested I contact the Audacity development team with my feedback and request changes. The head developer wrote back to say there was a new version just coming out that addressed many of the problems that users had brought up. Finalized in September, Audacity version 1.2.3 has been worked on for stability, and it also now has VU meters-- two of the most demanded changes. I have tried the new version at home and also made it available at CJSF, and so far have not had a crash. There are quite a few interesting tools on Audacity, and more plug-ins are available to download. There's the usual stuff like fades, equalization (several types) and normalization, but also a very decent "change pitch" feature that can make your voice higher or lower without making it faster or slower, and other goodies. You can import audio from any of the major audio formats (like .wav, .ogg and .wma), or record directly into Audacity. Audacity files only play on Audacity, but you can very easily "export" your audio as the format you want. If you install a Lame encoder, you can even export your audio as .mp3. There's a users' manual on-line (it works better when you access it on-line rather than download it as there are no page number s and it's written in html). At the station where I work, CJSF-FM in Burnaby, BC, Canada, we are thinking of making Audacity our primary editing software. Audacity is free, and as such, all our volunteers can use it on their home computers. We can also install it on the computers the university uses for teaching, and hold mass training sessions there. With other programs, we would have to pay for every copy we installed. I would love to hear from AMARC members who are using Audacity. You can also discuss with users and developers through the Audacity listserves. A US$39 per year membership gives access to all the software and forums on the sourceforge.org Web site. If you have a change you'd like made, you can suggest it or (the beauty of free and open source) if there's something you want changed, you can change it yourself! Globally, AMARC and other community media are actively working in solidarity with the free and open source software movement and others who put information into the commons instead of hoarding it for profit. If Audacity meets the needs of our members, perhaps we could make it our officially recommended audio editing software. What do you think? * This article was adapted from the CJSF-FM magazine Amplify. Frieda Werden |
|||