The Audacity of it all: Version 3.0 of open-source audio fave boasts new file format, 160+ bug fixes
- Reference: 1616152987
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/03/19/audacity_3/
- Source link:
Audacity originated from a 1999 research project at Carnegie Mellon University by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg, and was first released as an open-source audio editor in May 2000.
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Version 1.0 came in June 2002, and version 2.0 in March 2012, so a full version upgrade is not a common occurrence. It is massively popular, with over 108 million downloads recorded on the official FossHub download page, as noted [2]here , and not including other downloads such as builds made for Linux distros. The real number is estimated as "at least over 250 million downloads." It is the most downloaded software from FossHub.
The biggest enhancement in 3.0 is a new "unitary" file format. As Audacity developer James Crook [3]explained : "Previously we saved projects as a sometimes large number of small files, with an '.aup' file to coordinate the lot."
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Apparently this could cause confusion as some users assumed that the .aup file was the entire project. In version 3.0 this is actually the case: it is a SQLite database which includes all the component files.
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Audacity 3.0 has a new 'unitary' file format for projects
Crook said that working with the new project format is "a little faster than before" but closing a project "can be quite a lot slower." Crash recovery is said to be simpler because there are "no orphan block-files or missing block-files to worry about." Crook also reported that there are over 160 bug fixes in version 3.0, most but not all relating to minor problems.
There are a couple of implications to the new file format. One is that new-style projects do not open in older versions of Audacity, though you can export individual tracks.
Another is that active projects cannot be saved to FAT or FAT32 file systems because of the 4GB file size limit which "can easily be temporarily exceeded when editing," according to the [6]docs .
You spin me right round....
There is a new analyzer in Audacity 3.0 called Label Sounds, which is for adding track labels to recordings. A common example is where a vinyl record has been recorded and needs to be split into tracks. Label Sounds will detect the silences and tag the beginning and end of the tracks.
The Register tried this with limited success, the problem being that vinyl is never completely silent and with our old and slightly worn recording it was difficult to find a setting that would recognise the track breaks without also finding spurious breaks elsewhere, though it is possible that with more fine-tuning it would work. This could still be useful in other scenarios.
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The new Label Sounds tool helps to apply labels based on likely track divisions
The Noise Gate effect, for removing sounds below a specified threshold, has been improved with faster attack times and separate controls for attack, hold and decay (this might also be useful for a vinyl record dub). Macros support is improved with import and export options as well as a comment field.
Nyquist, a programming language for audio synthesis and analysis, has been upgraded to version 3.16 in Audacity, which the team said "enabled us to clear a lot of long-standing Nyquist-related Audacity bugs."
Another detail is that the Audacity Mixer Board now remains on top of the Audacity window, something which was always intended but previously not supported by the libraries used.
Audacity is cross-platform for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The project is written in C++ and uses the wxWidgets GUI library. The releases are 64-bit on Mac and Linux, 32-bit on Windows, but runs well on 64-bit. The code is [8]on GitHub . Native Apple Silicon is not yet supported (though Audacity runs on Rosetta 2 emulation) but a team member [9]said "that's possible in future, unless Apple outlaw open source software on Mac."
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Audacity includes a huge range of effects, with more available via plugins
There is good reason for Audacity's popularity. The utility is flexible, reliable, and has a large number of tools and effects, with support for plugins in a variety of formats. Audacity can load VST (Virtual Studio Technology) effects but not VST instruments. It is not the equal of some commercial alternatives such as Adobe Audition and it is a wave editor rather than a complete digital workstation.
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Audacity's great advantage (alongside its free availability) is exceptional ease of use, along with capabilities that are more than good enough for a huge range of audio editing tasks. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YFTYsVLduZT4rwXpsRGqtgAAABc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://blog.fosshub.com/audacity-exceeds-100-million-downloads/
[3] https://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-3-0-0-released/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YFTYsVLduZT4rwXpsRGqtgAAABc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/18/audacity.png
[6] https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/new_features_in_this_release.html
[7] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/18/labelsounds.png
[8] https://github.com/audacity
[9] https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=114242
[10] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/18/effects.png
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[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Detecting track breaks
I do find the vinyl version sounds much warmer.
Re: Detecting track breaks
That is one underrated piece, joking aside.
I wish more people listened to it.
And I wish even more people sang it. Constantly.
Re: Detecting track breaks
I do find the vinyl version sounds much more worn.
ftfy
Great!
As chance would have it I uncovered a batch of audio files I recorded off AOL Radio years ago, some of which had been split into individual tracks some not. One or two are 5 hours-worth of streamed music. Audacity was, and is, perfect for the job.
That label system would have been really useful a year ago when I recorded all the individual components (over 200) of the System Shock soundtrack through a GUS and needed to break them up into individual files. I love Audacity!
Another happy Audacity user
I've been using it for years. It's perfect for topping and tailing a final mix of a new recording. Quick and easy to use.
On one occasion I was able to hep a friend who had played just one duff note on a long guitar piece. I was able to find a match in an earlier verse, and cut and past it in seamlessly. You can expand the view so much that you can see individual wave cycles, so I was able to trim to a perfect join - wouldn't want to make a habit of it though!
Track Breaks ok - but we really we need a DJ detector!
Yep, cuts the track the moment a DJ is about to talkover. Just think of all those C-60 'Pick of the Pops ' recordings just waiting to be digitised and catalogued. A bonus would be a hetordyne eliminator for '208' recordings.
A beer for the creators and maintainers of this great public asset.
Have tried it, on and off....
I've tried Audacity on and off over the years, but have always found it a bit more fiddly and less intuitive that the "rival" Goldwave. Yes, I accept that Audacity is open source, cross platform and free, whereas Goldwave is not. But you can get the fully functional trial/demo version for free, and the lifetime purchase fee is minimal for what it does. I've edited 1000's of hours of audio with it over the years. Just the X/Y and visual spectrum displays are worth it on their own.
It is quite easy to set a heterodyne filter for those "208" recordings - just introduce a sharp notch at 9khz, or a roll off over 8khz - extremely easy to see on the spectrum graphic. I assume Audacity can do the same. Also useful for correcting those old tape/cassette recordings where the tape deck never ran at the exact speed.....
Great news
My favorite audio editor. Been using it for ages and for simple jobs it's perfect. I wouldn't record a 24 track session with it but hell for day to day editing there's nothing better out there. And it's free .. kudos to the Audacity team :)
Got the Torrent link
Projects like that are things that I support by torrenting them and leaving them available for upload.
I don't have any use for the application myself, but if it is popular, then I will torrent it, just like I torrent the latest Linux Mint releases.
I am happy to give up some of my bandwidth to Audacity.
Audacity is in my experience a rare FOSS project which is both extremely useful, and fairly easy to use. Wonderful tool.
Just a shame its really ugly still!
Pretty it isn't...
...but i can't recall an audio editor that was, to be honest.
And with wxWidgets, at least it looks like a desktop application with clearly marked UI elements, rather than a web page where everything is a muddled together, indistinguishable porridge.
Ripping vinyl
I used Magix Audio Cleaner to rip vinyl many years ago when I did it frequently (using Windows, one of the few reasons I used Windows). That was able to identify track breaks most of the time. The first version I used was a freebee on a cover mount disk on PCW, but I ended up buying the next version anyway. I think it included an MP3 encoder.
I did use Audacity 2.something to do the same a short while back. I'm sure that there was a plugin to place labels at periods of silence, although I found the label handling with Audacity a little awkward, and I don't believe that it had the ability to generate track listings for CD from the label names. But it can split the tracks into separate files so that they could be burned to CD in the correct sequence using K3B or Brassero.
When I decommission systems, I tend to keep the hard disk around for a while (well, I guess forever so far). I recently found the disk from the Windows system I used to do rips with about 30 albums ripped, but I could not read the labels and listings, although the audio was in WAV format, so I can actually listen to the rips.
Of course, I've updated my turntable now (a couple of times actually), so I really should rip them again. But it's surprising how good the rips sound. Most are from before the era of 'remastering', so they are more authentic than current CD purchases that have been messed around with.
Re: Ripping vinyl
Have you tried using abcde?
From the man page:
SYNOPSIS
abcde [options] [tracks]
DESCRIPTION
Ordinarily, the process of grabbing the data off a CD and encoding it,
then tagging or commenting it, is very involved. abcde is designed to
automate this. It will take an entire CD and convert it into a com‐
pressed audio format - Ogg/Vorbis, MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3), Free
Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), Ogg/Speex, MPP/MP+(Musepack), M4A (AAC) wv
(WavPack), Monkey's Audio (ape), Opus, True Audio (tta) or MPEG Audio
Layer II (MP2) format(s). With one command, it will:
* Do a CDDB or Musicbrainz query over the Internet to look up your
CD or use a locally stored CDDB entry, or read CD-TEXT from your
CD as a fallback for track information
* Download the album art appropriate for your music tracks with
many user configurable options for download and post download
alterations
And a lot more options
I have used Audacity a few times to digitise recording made on cassette tape years ago. Its probably suitable for the majority of users like myself who aren't sound engineers or audiophiles and therefore don't need all the functions that commercial audio editors come with. Although perhaps there are sound engineers who do use Audacity as find it good enough for their needs to?
Excellent news
These days the rather splendid Reaper is my weapon of choice, but it was Audacity that I cut my teeth on many years ago. Glad to hear that it's in rude health.
Still no VST Instruments?
Disappointing to see that there is still no support for VST instruments. Given the ubiquity of them in music production since the early 2000s and that Audacity is a wannabe Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), this is a huge omission. Despite this, it is still in the premier league of open source tools. I can't think of many others that get so much right - including the user interface. For free, you cannot argue with what the team have produced. This is one project I will not hesitate to contribute to once I have been able to put in the leg work to learn enough to be useful.
Some of the comments above made me chuckle. It reminds me of people seeing word processors for the first time and being amazed at what they could do. Yes folks, editing audio on computers is a thing. Works quite well too.
Detecting track breaks
"with our old and slightly worn recording it was difficult to find a setting that would recognise the track breaks without also finding spurious breaks elsewhere"
You weren't testing it on 4'33" were you?