It boldly goes (Audacity)

Member Name: Chouchin

Product:	Audacity
Date:	21/08/08 (266 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: User-friendly, versatile, free

Disadvantages: Need to invest time for good results

So you've been dancing to the music recording industry's tune over the last few decades and now have a motley collection of music in every medium from vinyl through tape cassettes, minidisks, CDs to MP3 files. Plus, of course, all the associated hardware to enable you to listen at home, in the car, on the train. What you really, really want (is that on your iPod?) is to standardise, digitalise and generally sort everything out, isn't it? You have the hardware, obviously, and probably enough length and variety of cable to wire up a small state. But these alone will not give you good results without some decent software to do the clever manipulating stuff. You need Audacity.

There are many, many good things to say about this product, but let's start with the best. It's free. It costs nothing, nada, nix, nichts, zero. It's what computer people call open source software, freely available software including coding so you can change, enhance or configure it as you wish. Go to http://audacity.sourceforge.net. Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems are all supported, and the file size is about 2.5MB. New releases and updates are also available at the same site with guidance about stability and recommendations for user ability.

So now you have it, what are you going to do with it? If any of you have already come across it, it was probably, like me, through acquiring a USB turntable to convert vinyl LPs into digital files. Many such turntable packages include this software and if they don't, you'd be well advised to get it and use it. Analogue to digital conversion of anything, be it images or music, is not totally straightforward to achieve the best results, but this software puts the facility of a basic recording studio at your amateur fingertips. And, of course, it's not just for converting stuff; even if you were born in the CD era you'll still want to download, edit and customise your sounds and as long as the source can be fed into your computer, this software will give you top results.

I won't take you through how to load it, access it and all the screen options presented. We'd be here for way too long and if you're interested after reading this review there are tutorials on the website which explore all the possibilities in detail. I'm going to stick to an overview and apply my three idiot-guide software tests: is it user-friendly and intuitive; will it perform the full range of functions I require from basic to advanced; is there a help function which is easily available and understandable. Normally I add a fourth: is it good value for money, but that's already been answered. Did I mention it was free?

So user-friendliness. The basic screen is configured so that the main function buttons have the familiar forward, back, stop, pause and record symbols on them. This is reassuring for the newbie as well as making it instinctive to use. Other settings are accessed from drop-down menus of the kind we are used to, and the edit function includes unlimited "undo" and "redo" which is no end of use. Pressing the record button sets the source playing which you can hear through the speakers, and at the same time the wave form of the sound appears on the screen, divided into minutes and seconds. It looks like a series of earthquakes on a seismograph. It's a bit more techie, even a little daunting, but you soon become familiar with the patterns which is the key to the cleaning up and sorting out process later.

A couple of stages, unless you're a sound engineer in which case you're unlikely to be using this, are less instinctive and you'll be well advised to follow the manual or tutorials. Before recording you have to set the sound effect to "normalise" which automatically adjusts the volume. There are, of course, many other sound effects possible which you can play around with at a later stage. To optimise the sound after recording you need to remove any background noise such as hiss or crackles in music, or intrusive environmental noise in voice recording. Such extraneous noise shows up by a different wave pattern. You select the section simply by highlighting it with the mouse, and you tell the software to remember it! How neat is that? Having done it once, you don't need to do it again until you restart; selecting the option noise removal will do it automatically. I have actually managed to almost completely erase a bit where the stylus stuck in a scratch on an LP. You can repeat the process over and over until you're happy. Obviously with a scratch it needs a bit of work, and is not totally, but as near as dammit, perfect. Bits of background hiss are soon fixed.

Well now you've got over an hour's worth of good quality sound, but you need to be able to identify individual sections or tracks. Back to the seismograph, you can zoom out so that whole sections of the earthquake pattern are on screen. The links between the wave activity are the silences between the tracks. Simply draw a line and label it. It can be edited later if necessary.

Overall I'll give it 4/5 for use-friendliness and intuitiveness, although to be fair this soon rises to 5/5 with practice.

Next: does it do everything in one package or are other add-ons necessary. I've described the basic recording and clean-up procedures and that might be all you want. But if you explore the possibilities, you might be tempted to try a little sound mixing. Strip out the vocals; enhance the bass; overlay a different sound effect; change the pitch without affecting the volume; create a podcast. Addicted to ringtones? Use this software to generate some new effects to wow your friends, if that's your thing. (Personally I think that mobiles and mobile ring tones are part of a fiendish alien plot to drive us all mad before taking over the world. But anyway.) These are all available in the basic package. If you want more advanced enhancements, the website offers more bells and whistles in the form of special effects and some fine tuning adjustments which I have to confess are a bit over my head. A point to note is that the output file is in .wav format, an uncompressed format. To save and store easily on whatever output medium you choose - CD, DVD, iPod, computer file - you need a compressed format such as MP3, and for this you need another download. There's one available on the Audacity website, or there are plenty of others available. So is it complete, covering the whole range of requirements? Well what you get is way more than most of us would use, so we'll ignore the MP3 conversion and give it 5/5.

Third point, you're stuck and want help. The booklet that came with my USB turntable was commendably brief, but covered all the basics in clear English with good screenshots. All the information was there to convert LPs using the turntable, with the website details if you want to do more. The website has tutorials which are easy to follow. Trust me on this - I could follow them, and sound transfer has always been an unilluminated corner in my brain. For reasons I won't bore you with, I used to have to copy from VCR to VCR, but getting the audio in and out correct was more by luck than judgement. If you're still stuck, there are some FAQs and also a forum where you can post a query and somebody, somewhere will be able to answer it. Definitely 5/5.

But before you all rush off and crash the site, I will just sound a small note of warning. It's not a fault of the software, but it is quite a time-consuming process. To check you are happy with the recorded sound, you have to listen to it - many times if you are doing something complicated like adding a sound effect. There's no way to speed this up; the time it takes a track to play is real time. If you want to set stuff to record, go away and leave it and come back to a finished product, then you don't need Audacity. On the other hand, it seems a shame with all this technology available not to optimise your sound quality. You've got the fancy speakers, and probably the fancy headphones as well, but if the basic quality isn't there they can't work miracles. And what's wrong with whiling away an hour or two listening to your favourite music in your free time? The software's free too - did I mention that?

Summary: All-in-one music recording and editing software

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