Audacity, the free cross-platform sound editor for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, is now coming of age, after two years of development. 1.2 is the first major stable release since 1.0 in June 2002, but those years haven't gone wasted: the new release includes professional-quality dithering and resampling, new pitch- and speed-changing effects. Also new: cross-fade effects, screen display fixes, an MP3 tag fix, and audio problems fixed on Apple Power Mac G5s, plus much more.
Audacity is a free audio editor able to record sounds, play sounds, import/export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and edit sound files, with built-in amplitude envelope editing, customizable spectrogram mode, frequency analysis, and built-in effects plus support for VST plug-ins. With this software reaching new maturity, this is clearly the best free solution out there.
Obviously, all of us like software that's easy on our budget, but as a college computer music teacher, it's also essential for schools with limited funds: lab installs are easy, and thanks to cross-platform support, you can easily encourage students to take the software home to their machine, using legitimate freeware instead of turning to software piracy.
This software also continues the trend of cross-platform freeware coming to OS X, and increasingly with Aqua user-interfaces over ugly UNIX-styled UIs.
Audacity, the free cross-platform sound editor for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, is now coming of age, after two years of development. 1.2 is the first major stable release since 1.0 in June 2002, but those years haven't gone wasted: the new release includes professional-quality dithering and resampling, new pitch- and speed-changing effects. Also new: cross-fade effects, screen display fixes, an MP3 tag fix, and audio problems fixed on Apple Power Mac G5s, plus much more.
