Value, Ease of Use and Efficiency for Podcasts
We use Audacity to edit and record two podcasts. It is a major help in efficiency and affordability.
Overview
What is Audacity?
Audacity is a free and open source audio recording and editing software.
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AGPR/AlexanderG Public Relations, LLC (Public Relations & Communications, 1-10 employees)
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What is Audacity?
Audacity is a free and open source audio recording and editing software.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is GarageBand?
Apple offers GarageBand, a digital audio workstation packaged with its operating system.
What is Audition?
Adobe offers Audition as part of the Creative Cloud suite, a sound and audio editing and creation application.
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Audacity?
Audacity Video
A basic tutorial on how to do simple audio editing in Audacity for your podcast, videos, or presentations.
Audacity Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Audacity is a free and open source audio recording and editing software.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 5.
The most common users of Audacity are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Community Insights
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Audacity has been widely used by various individuals and organizations for a range of audio editing needs. Its robust features make it a preferred choice for editing audio in video recordings and podcast episodes, as users have found it helpful for cleaning up audio and making the editing process easy. With Audacity, users can accomplish advanced tasks such as compressing and normalizing audio for multiple platforms. It is also handy for syncing prerecorded audio segments to presentations, allowing attendees to view them at their own pace. Faculty and staff use Audacity to create media for students, including classroom use and public-facing content like podcasts. It is appreciated by film, TV, and commercial composers due to its speed and small footprint, making it ideal for recording audio for YouTube channels without the need to purchase expensive software. Additionally, Audacity is commonly utilized by instructors to support students in developing audio editing skills for podcasts. Its cost-effectiveness and cross-platform compatibility make it a popular choice in the podcast production industry for multi-track editing and post-processing. Audacity's simplicity, ease of use, and ability to trim, edit, and extract audio in various formats make it a favorite tool among users with varying audio needs. Whether it's editing meeting recordings, creating music samples or karaoke tracks for sale on websites, or simply applying quick tweaks and cuts in video production work, Audacity proves to be a reliable secondary audio editing software. Its versatility extends even further, as it is used by linguistics labs for recording and manipulating audio data for analysis and by eLearning video producers for seamless audio editing tasks such as adding music and ensuring smooth transitions. Overall, users rely on Audacity for its ability to efficiently handle a wide range of audio editing tasks with its user-friendly interface.
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Robust Audio Editing: Users have consistently praised Audacity for its robust capabilities and wide variety of controls, with many stating that it meets their audio editing needs. The program allows users to splice audio segments together seamlessly, ensuring a smooth editing experience. Additionally, the availability of basic editing features such as cuts and fades is appreciated by users who are looking to make simple edits.
Ease of Use: Many reviewers have highlighted how easy it is to navigate and use Audacity's user interface. They find it simple and intuitive, even for those with minimal experience in audio editing. The program's workflow is considered easy and straightforward, allowing users to quickly complete tasks without feeling overwhelmed. Furthermore, the learning curve for Audacity is small, making it accessible to new users who want to get started with audio editing right away.
Free and Cost-effective Solution: The fact that Audacity is free has been widely appreciated by users looking for a budget-friendly option. Its open-source nature makes it accessible to anyone without having to spend money on expensive software. Users also value the program's compatibility with both Mac and PC platforms, allowing a wide range of individuals to access its features at no cost.
Onboarding Tutorial Needed: Some users have suggested that Audacity could benefit from implementing an onboarding tutorial walkthrough within the software to help new users understand its full capabilities and features.
Issues with Exporting Files: Several reviewers have reported encountering difficulties when exporting files in specific formats. They mentioned having to download patches or additional plugins to enable the desired functionality.
Messy Dashboard and Navigation: A common complaint among users is that the dashboard of Audacity appears cluttered and lacks intuitive design, making it challenging to navigate through the various options efficiently. Improving the navigation system would greatly enhance the overall usability of the software.
Users commonly recommend using Audacity for simple audio works, home projects, or low budget editions. It is suggested as a support tool for audio editing, including audio on video, and for filtering out background noise from recordings or for experimenting. Audacity is frequently recommended for quick edits on small audio projects. However, some users caution against considering it a professional digital audio workstation or a tool for creating high-quality audio files. Despite this, many believe that Audacity is a great tool for beginners in audio editing and offers simplicity and power for editing or creating tracks. Users also recommend Audacity for podcasting needs, easy and straightforward audio editing, basic sound editing, desktop audio editing, and personal or business use. It is highly recommended for technical and hands-on teams on a limited budget. Users suggest trying out Audacity due to its user-friendly nature and the belief that it can rival paid products in terms of features. They also recommend watching tutorials and consulting online manuals for assistance. Overall, users think Audacity is an excellent choice for beginners, a good starting point for those entering the field of audio editing, and a reliable option for basic yet powerful audio editing tasks.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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August 09, 2023
Archivist experience with Audacity
I use Audacity for audio recording, editing, normalizing audio levels, and more. It's especially handy when I need to sync prerecorded audio segments to a presentation so it can be viewed more than once by attendees at their own pace. The program offers quite a bit of functionality for a free software.
- Splicing audio segments together
- Recording & re-recording directly in the program
- Editing sound levels so segments aren't dramatically louder or quieter than another
- Adding more instructions: it's a simple program but users may need an external guide to get started
- Automatic filter for background noise
- Speech to text captioning
November 03, 2022
Basic sound editing and recording in a dead-simple package
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I want to be able to take a meeting recording, audio memo, or song idea; then quickly edit and export it. Audacity does this flawlessly and doubles as a simple recording interface.
- Simple editing of waveforms without much prior knowledge of audio manipulation.
- The UI is very simple, but also helpfully sparse. This cuts down on the sense of feeling overwhelmed by the task.
- It does incredibly well with different audio formats and is able to work with all major audio sources.
- Although the UI is very simple, it's not great to look at. Making the program more exciting visually would be a great plus.
- The functionality has never been lacking for what it is, but has also not seen major additions in a long time.
- The support base of the community is truly impressive, but is also very intimidating to wade through. Having better standardized help avenues would be a benefit to new users.
July 16, 2021
Great DAW to start any recording
We use the live audio from [Audacity] to do a live to 2-track stereo recording with audacity from our Behringer X32. After service, we'll use the effects to compress and normalize the audio which will then be uploaded across multiple campuses. Services will then be uploaded online for other members to listen to after the fact or used for coaching/improvement.
- Easy stereo recording
- Simple interface for those with minimal experience
- Easy workflow
- Improved GUI
- Create version for Mac
- Better VST integration
We use Audacity to record audio for our YouTube channel. Audacity addresses many problems such as eliminating the cost to buy recording software. Audacity is completely free and open-source, there are many other recording software [programs] that are free but I think that audacity is a simple-to-use and feature-packed software.
The recordings are clear and audio can also be edited in audacity.
We use Audacity to record audio, eliminate background noise, and also add reverb and other effects that come built in to Audacity.
The recordings are clear and audio can also be edited in audacity.
We use Audacity to record audio, eliminate background noise, and also add reverb and other effects that come built in to Audacity.
- Simple user interface for anyone to use.
- Open-source, so it's completely free.
- Comes with a huge list of features, [and] it also has the option to add plugins.
- Doesn't require a large amount of RAM and can be used on almost any computer.
- The user interface theme has only two options, light and dark. It would be better if it was more customizable.
- Sometimes there is a lag or break when opening the software.
- There is no option to listen to the audio live with effects while you are recording.
May 08, 2021
Great free app for new users
Audacity is being used by individuals as a standalone audio recording and editing software for audio projects as well as to record, edit, or mix audio in support of video projects. Faculty and staff usually create media to be used by students, often within the classroom. Some users create public facing content including podcasts.
- Audacity is great at supporting users across platforms and is equally approachable on Mac and PC
- Audacity gives good basic editing (cuts and fades) and recording (usb or internal microphone) functionality for free
- Audacity has several helpful tips geared towards the novice user, including helping them to export a file rather than just save an Audacity project
- Audacity has changed some icons recently for certain editing functions and that can be confusing for users and support
- The interface isn't the worst I have seen but the UI isn't exactly enjoyable on Mac or PC
- Some of the functionality can quickly feel overwhelming to a new user, pointing toward help documentation the first time an advanced tool is used would be appreciated
March 20, 2020
Excellent product for simple audio editing needs
I use Audacity as a quick and simple tool to edit audio files for use on our website, to add to simple videos, to make mashups of my music and vocal clips and to do fade-ins and fade-outs when putting groups of songs together. I also use it to quickly make loops of my music for uploading to royalty-free sites. When I'm not on my Mac Audacity is my go-to (free and simple) program to edit audio tracks on PC.
- It's simple and intuitive.
- I can quickly and easily see where I need to cut off or extend tracks.
- It's easy to raise or lower volume and to add silence to areas of a track.
February 21, 2020
Doesn't hurt to have a free product in my tool set
Right now, we are using Audacity after recording podcasts to edit the output of the resulting audio file. This includes splicing, adding an intro and outro, removing "ums" and "you knows" as well as any other interference, as well as removing other unnecessary noise.
- Open-source.
- Community support, lots of help documents.
- Difficult interface to understand without the help documents.
- Some functions require the use of third-party plugins that are more expensive than the product (which is free).
February 05, 2020
The best you can find for the price
My time runs on a tight budget and you can never beat the price of free. What makes it even better is that even with it being free software it has the ability to do just as much if not more than all the professional software that is on the market.
- Basic recording.
- Editing.
- Open-source so no actual support.
- Time between updates vary.
March 20, 2019
Use Audacity (a Free Open-Source Software) for Robust Easy Editing of Your Audio Files
We use Audacity on a weekly basis for editing the audio of our video recordings in our online courses and editing the audio of our podcast episodes. It is just used by the marketing department within the company. Audacity helps us to easily clean up the audio in our video and audio recordings, and more importantly, it makes the editing process very easy. The learning curve for using Audacity is small, yet it is a robust software, allowing room for learning more and getting advanced things done within audio editing.
- Audacity has a wide variety of controls and capabilities for editing, making it a very robust tool for audio editing.
- Even though it's a robust tool, it is very easy to use to get many basic things done in audio editing. The learning curve is small.
- Love that audacity is free! What else could you ask for? There really is no reason not to use it.
- While Audacity is straight forward and easy to use, it takes a lot of digging through the software to really understand the full capability of what you can do with it. It would be great if there was some kind of onboarding tutorial walkthrough within the software that you could go through when you start using it.
- I'm not sure it's a problem everyone experiences, but I've had issues with the software, trying to export files within specific file formats. I had to download patches to the software that made it possible. If the software came with the functionality built in, that would be great. Especially considering the fact that the formats I've been exporting to are mainstream formats. (i.e. .mp3, .wav, etc.).
- The dashboard of audacity is pretty messy. It's not super intuitively built. Improving the navigation of the software would make it more usable, in my experience.
I use Audacity for both business and pleasure. Since I use Linux with only open source solutions, it works perfectly for my varying needs.
- It is very lightweight. Uses relatively few resources, but is robust with its functionality.
- It is highly intuitive, user-friendly. If you want simplicity without a huge learning curve, this is a great solution.
- I know this is specific, but its Noise Reduction tool is excellent. For anyone needing to remove background noise, quickly and easily, with quality and fine-tunable results, you can't go wrong!
- My biggest complaint is when multitracking, on occasion, Audacity's source files corrupt and are NOT recoverable. If you have an important, complex project, Audacity might not be the ideal solution for this reason alone. I have scoured the forums for help, and have found many well-thought suggestions, but more than once I have had to go back to square one, which is very frustrating.
- The UI could use some updating. Although user-friendly, some icons/functions are not immediately clear.
March 20, 2019
Audacity: Quick and Easy Audio Editing
As a digital media arts instructor, we utilize Audacity as a secondary audio editing software for video production work. In conjunction with other professional audio production software that can feel bloated or overly complicated for small tasks, Audacity fills the gap for projects when we need quick and efficient tweaks and cuts, rather than full audio engineering work.
- Easy to learn user interface.
- Reliable
- Compact (small install size and can be loaded onto a flash drive).
- Cannot natively export audio to MP3: requires download of LAME MP3 encoder to enable that functionality.
- Multi-track recording can be difficult (clunky) to work with.