Audacious!

Audacious!

This blog is on a quickly approaching official hiatus. As I work to reorganize my life and finish my portfolio among other things. However Audacity solved one of my current problems in such a wonderful way it deserves a mention.

Ann and I are taking a missions class at church called Perspectives. One of my duties is taking the tapes of each weekly speaker and digitizing the audio so it can be burned onto CDs and archived.

The first program I tried to use got the job done, but rather inelegantly. It brought my computer to a crawl, used 450mb of physical RAM to record one 60 minute file and it’s idea of mono is left channel only.

Then I found Audacity. Audacity is a fully cross-platform (Mac/Windows/Linux) open-source (free and actively developed) audio recorder and full featured editor. It has done everything I’ve needed. And it’s done it fast and in the background. Even with four hours of audio open and while exporting a 250mb aiff file RAM usage has never topped 35mb. It offers various other niceties like live waveform recording to help keep levels in check, fade-in/fade-out controls and unlimited undo!

There are a whole slews of plug-ins and even an audio effects programing language based on Lisp called Nyquist. I’ll be all over that if I ever decide that my true calling is to be an audio geek.

That you Audacity crew! You’ve this project a non-hassle for me.

So far I’ve resisted the urge to give anyone a “God-voice-echo”. :)

Xian 01:43 AM, 02.11.04 - p-link