Perhaps all of you who are interested in manipulating audio files already know about Audacity, but for those who don't...
. A few days ago a need arose for an audio editing program. My Aunt had some CD recordings made of church services which she had attended while snowbirding in Florida. Of course she didn't try to play the CDs before she came home to central NY. Turned out that she was not able to hear anything at all on them. One day we were talking on the phone and the discussion turned to computers and such and she told me about the CDs. So I offered to take a look at them the next time she was in our neighborhood.
. I tried to listen to them on my computer and found that there were actually tracks on them, but I could just barely hear them with all the sliders up full and my powered speakers cranked up too. So I went to Download.com to see if there was something there that I could use to try to salvage the tracks. Voila, there was a whole section there devoted to audio so I sorted the audio production subcategory by User Rating and CNet rating. Turns out that 'Audacity' had one of the highest ratings by both and it was FREEware
!
. Having never done anything much more than straight dubs and copies with audio tracks, it took me some time to get the hang of what some of the terms meant and how the proggy worked - not a lot of documentation on the program is readily available on its home site. But it wasn't long before I had tracks that needed the scale expanded to be visible in the wave form display, expanded to nearly normal volume. Since the tracks were mostly voice, I was also able to use the 'compression' effect to smooth the levels across some of the tracks.
. I was very impressed and I didn't even scratch the surface of 'Audacity's' abilities. Don't hesitate to grab a copy. Go direct to its page on SourceForge . Be aware that you will need several times the size of the file you are working on of free disk space and plenty of free space on the drive where your TEMP or TMP folders are located - one of the sermons was nearly a 500MB .WAV file!. You can change the folder that Audacity uses as its temp folder within the program, but the choice doesn't become active until the next time you run it. And Audacity doesn't clean up its temp files until the next time you run it. Each pass of a tool will take up the entire file's worth of space in the temp folder, so be aware of it.
.bh.
There's the :sun: !
. A few days ago a need arose for an audio editing program. My Aunt had some CD recordings made of church services which she had attended while snowbirding in Florida. Of course she didn't try to play the CDs before she came home to central NY. Turned out that she was not able to hear anything at all on them. One day we were talking on the phone and the discussion turned to computers and such and she told me about the CDs. So I offered to take a look at them the next time she was in our neighborhood.
. I tried to listen to them on my computer and found that there were actually tracks on them, but I could just barely hear them with all the sliders up full and my powered speakers cranked up too. So I went to Download.com to see if there was something there that I could use to try to salvage the tracks. Voila, there was a whole section there devoted to audio so I sorted the audio production subcategory by User Rating and CNet rating. Turns out that 'Audacity' had one of the highest ratings by both and it was FREEware
!. Having never done anything much more than straight dubs and copies with audio tracks, it took me some time to get the hang of what some of the terms meant and how the proggy worked - not a lot of documentation on the program is readily available on its home site. But it wasn't long before I had tracks that needed the scale expanded to be visible in the wave form display, expanded to nearly normal volume. Since the tracks were mostly voice, I was also able to use the 'compression' effect to smooth the levels across some of the tracks.
. I was very impressed and I didn't even scratch the surface of 'Audacity's' abilities. Don't hesitate to grab a copy. Go direct to its page on SourceForge . Be aware that you will need several times the size of the file you are working on of free disk space and plenty of free space on the drive where your TEMP or TMP folders are located - one of the sermons was nearly a 500MB .WAV file!. You can change the folder that Audacity uses as its temp folder within the program, but the choice doesn't become active until the next time you run it. And Audacity doesn't clean up its temp files until the next time you run it. Each pass of a tool will take up the entire file's worth of space in the temp folder, so be aware of it.
.bh.
There's the :sun: !
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