Audacity: It has got the audacity!

Audacity is an open source software for multi track recording and editing sound from Audacity Developer Team. Winner of the SourceForge Community Choice Awards 2007 — Multimedia Category, this software allows multi track recording, editing, add effects, analyze and produce music.

Recording offers a wide variety of options like mono, stereo and panning which can be done live while recording. Also level meters are available that monitor volume levels while and after recording. Files can be imported and exported as wav, aiff, ogg and ogg and can be imported mp3, mp2 (this requires a third party software libmad). However finished music can be easily exported as mp3. Raw files can also be imported.

Editing is very easy by simple clicks on the mouse – cut, copy and paste. Also the drawing tool can be used with ease.

Effects are abundant in Audacity. Normal effects like reverb, chorus and echo are there to name a few and complex effects like Nyquist Prompt, Wahwah adder and FFT filter too are available making the Audacity a good bet.

Sound can be edited at 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit (floating point) samples and up to a quality of 96 KHz. Also tracks having different formats or sample rate can be mixed; they will be automatically converted.

A detailed frequency analysis can be done Plot Spectrum option and frequencies can be visualized by Spectrogram.

Drawbacks :

1) Though this program allows MIDI import, this does not offer live MIDI recording by connecting any MIDI device.

2) Also, there is no inbuilt mixer available though mixing can be done by options available at the side of each track.

The final word is that Audacity is a simple yet complete recording and editing software that offers the user full flexibility in his endeavors.

Software version and other info :

Version : 1.3.2 – beta (Unicode)
Website : AudaCity
Supported OS : Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux