Audacity worth using ?

Check out Reaper.fm its also free (for small business and evaluations) and its amazing. Way more fully featured than audacity, although audacity is pretty great for its limited scope.
 
Put simply, Audacity is the most powerful free audio editing program out there - you shouldn't need anything else unless you are doing something really specialised. Get it!
 
KnightZero said:
I do gaming video's but I always take my voice track and run it through Audacity to remove any hum from computer fans or other ambient noise. Then I use its Noise Gate plugin to remove most of my breathing, as I breathe fairly loud and it annoys me.
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Never used anything for audio as i have only ever done gaming which doesnt really require it as much as i would say a musician would need it.
Is it a simple process to remove ambient noise and does it affect the rest of your audio?
 
justdarrell said:
Never used anything for audio as i have only ever done gaming which doesnt really require it as much as i would say a musician would need it.
Is it a simple process to remove ambient noise and does it affect the rest of your audio?
Click to expand...

I never notice any effect to my voice but say you have an air conditioner or something in your room. Even if you remove the ambient noise when your not talking, it'll still be in your talking parts as the recording is overlapped. It's reduced but it's still there, so if its real loud to start with you'll still have issues. So reducing ambient noise as much as possible in your room is still a big thing.

The process is like 2min worth of work.

What I do is I hit record, then just wait a couple seconds then do my intro & episode. When I edit the audio, I use this initial pause at the start for the ambient noise profile. In Audacity it is a two step process. You select this area at the start, or any area you aren't talking for a second. Then goto Effect > Noise Removal. Click Get Noise Profile. Now select the whole track (ctrl+A) then goto Effect > Noise Removal and Click the OK box. I've never needed to change any settings for it to work perfect. It'll take a few seconds to process and you'll see that your audio is cleaner now if you zoom in.

Also to get a more realistic view of your talking, in the top left of the track, under the Pause button. There is a drop down box. Change it to Waveform (DB).
 
I'm at university studying Music Technology, I'm familiar with industry standard audio editing software and have been for over 5 years now and I STILL use Audacity from time to time. It's brilliant in its simplicity, and being free makes it even more appealing.

Some of the processing you can apply is surprisingly high end for a free piece of software. I will often import tracks into Audacity just to use some of the tools, such as the noise removal, before going back to the higher end software.

Definitely worth a look, really powerful little piece of software!
 
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