Powerful audio editing tools with a no-frills interface
January 17, 2020

Powerful audio editing tools with a no-frills interface

Jeff Eaton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Audacity

Our team produces a number of podcasts on development, design, and content strategy — audio editing isn't a normal part of our workflow, so we don't have a suite of high-end editing tools on hand to use. Our hunt for a low-cost, cross-platform audio editing tool flexible enough for multi-track editing and post-processing led us to Audacity and we've been using it ever since.

Pros

  • Audio filtering and processesing
  • Multi-track editing and audio compositing

Cons

  • User experience and workflow is… very open source
  • Lacks presets or guidance for common export targets (podcasting, CD-quality music, etc)
  • Better quality podcast audio, happier listeners!
  • Zero cost to evaluate and use, though the learning curve is steeper than some other options.
Using Apple's GarageBand for audio editing felt like fighting someone else's highly opinionated ideas of how we should be working. Simple tasks (like keeping audio in sync while making edits across multiple tracks) felt like more work than they should've been, while other tasks (noise reduction, balancing levels) felt so simplified that we had less control than Audacity.

Adobe Audition was just too much tool for us — we had access to it via our company's Creative Cloud subscriptions, but the learning curve was too high for our relatively modest production needs. Audacity, for all of its clunky interface issues, fit just right.
An interface overhaul would be a great boost for Audacity, but beggars can't be choosers — its price is impossible to beat, and it does the job we need it to do.

Do you think Audacity delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Audacity's feature set?

Yes

Did Audacity live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Audacity go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Audacity again?

Yes

We use Audacity as a podcast editing, prep, and export tool; it has enough filtering and audio-processing features to perform tasks like balancing tracks, removing background noise, and it lets us make fast edits across multiple synced audio tracks. A common scenario for us is chopping out a minute or two of irrelevant conversation from the three parallel tracks for each podcast participant — some of the simpler editing tools we evaluated required that edits be made track-by-track, all but ensuring the audio falls out of sync.

The more complex the editing, the more Audacity's clunky interface can frustrate — it's impossible to beat the price (free!) but it's also easy to feel lost when trying to accomplish something basic until you learn its idiosyncrasies.

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