Audacity

[efischle]

There was a client that called today during a workshop and left a message asking about Audacity, a free, downloadable audio editing program. She says she had about 4 hours of audio that she was trying to edit, but the program was having all sorts of problems. The complete message, with call-back number (and list of problems) is saved on the voicemail of the MLL phone. Does anyone know anything about Audacity who could help?

[dcv]

I just called the client and left a message to call me back in the MC (where I'm currently working).

In case she doesn't call back before I leave and somebody else wants to give her help but doesn't know much about Audacity - Audacity is a pretty straightforward and easy to figure out multitrack editor that anybody who's used Soundtrack or Audition can probably figure out pretty easily. You should try the portable (no install) version on the MLL macs - http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps/audacity/ - and see if you can follow along with the client to help her out.

[nlopez]

wow, 4 hours of audio? I think that's gonna require pacience no matter what you're using. A lot of RAM and a fast CPU because audacity does all it's work in 64-bit floating point IIRC, oh, and a fast disk to keep loading that 4 hours of audio as needed.
Did you plug the MLL audio room?

[dparm]

Having used Audacity, I can definitely vouch that it needs lots of RAM and drive space. 4 hours worth of audio is definitely on the order of hundreds if not thousands of megabytes.

It may be more advantageous to break it into 30- or 60-minute blocks and then just splice those together.

[dcv]

I've recorded 4-6 track songs in Audacity on my relatively modest PC (512 MB of RAM, Athlon64 2800+). Sure, working with uncompressed WAVs takes up a lot of disk space, but Audacity never seemed to be buckling under the CPU strain (at least until I exported the final product) or running out of memory. The fact that I wasn't using any audio filters probably helped, but still - Has something changed in the last few versions to make it eat RAM or something?

I could be wrong, but the first thing I think of when I hear somebody has four hours of audio is that they have four hours of speeches or lecture that they want to cut the dead spots out of and/or split into smaller, easier to digest pieces. If that's the case, audio fidelity isn't top priority, and I'd bet that if the source files are coming from a little handheld recorder, the sample rate is probably low (22050 Hz or 32000 Hz) so the WAV files aren't scarily big (though still bigger than mp3s). So this is not a particularly intensive (but still time consuming) task, and I bet most any MMC could walk the client through cutting up audio files using Audacity - or, as Nick suggested, plug the audio room if the client has time (or at least plug using Soundtrack Pro or Adobe Audition, which are actually officially supported by OSCR and are best equipped for this task).

[mjones1]

If she wants to make an appointment, or come in during walk-in hours on any Tuesday or Thursday, I would be glad to look into it. I've used Audacity quite a bit as well...

If she can't split it up on her machine, we could try it on one of our beastly machines at the top of the underground...

[amccabe]

I talked to this lady 3 times last night while I was wonking in the MZ. She is having trouble getting Audacity on Kubuntu linux to recognize her microphone. She has a 3Ghz pentium 4m, 3GB RAM, and lots of hard drive space, so that isn't an issue. But it is on a desktop computer (obviously, given the specs).

She is going to buy a new microphone today and see if it works with Audacity. If not, she will probably end-up using a tape recorder and coming to the MZ to digitize the recordings with something like Quicktime Pro.

[nlopez]

a USB microphone or are we just talking about finding the right mixer settings to record from the on-board audio? If it works out-of-the-box on OSX it probably will on Linux too. http://alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ should give you a good idea about Linux compatibility.