Of All the Audacity! How I Got Started Using the Open Source Audio Editor

I really could have used Audacity, when I was eight years old... When I was a kid, my little sister and I used to create our own "radio plays," recorded dramas we put on tape with our dad's clunky old tape recorder. It was actually a lot of fun, and we didn't mind all that rewinding and fast-forwarding and re-recording our dialog... fiddling with the settings and our makeshift sound effects till we got it all just right. Then again, we were just eight and six, so my sister and I had all the patience in the world.

Fast forward, oh... about 32 years... and you'll find me again recording audio. But this time, I've got a lot less patience, and there's no button-pushing, no manually rewinding, no nervously fast-forwarding by hand, no feverishly listening for that spot where I need to start recording again to cover up what I want to make go away. Nowadays, you'll find me recording with Audacity, a great open-source audio editing program that does just about everything I need it to, for the modest purposes of my individual podcasts... as well as the professional needs of the nationally syndicated radio show I help produce each week.

If you've been around the podcasting scene for longer than a few days, you've probably heard folks talking about Audacity, the open source audio editor that's quickly become one of the defacto industry standards for podcasters. Audacity is free to download, and with the plug-ins that come with it (or that you can add yourself at no cost), it offers considerable power for both Windows PC users and Mac users. Clearly, no software program is perfect, but Audacity provides a tremendous amount of power and potential to users, without a very steep learning curve. With a few well-chosen pointers in the right direction, an adventurous spirit, and regular practice, Audacity users can become power users who can produce quality podcasts and other audio programs in a relatively short time span, and for little to no money.

This open source software (created by the efforts of the open source development community, a bunch of people who literally build excellent software out of the goodness of their own hearts), crept into the field of vision of thousands upon thousands of individuals who had been chomping at the bit, wanting to create their own audio, but were unable (or unwilling) to pay the high prices of commercial audio creation/editing software. This little-program-that-could has a wide variety of features which are not only easy to use, but are very efficient in what they do. It's such a good program, that many independent audio producers use it to create broadcast-quality programs for real-live radio. If you're in the radio business, you know that means it's good. If you're not in radio, trust me - that means it's good.

I can testify to that, myself. I use Audacity on a regular basis, to not only produce podcasts, but to digitally produce the nationally syndicated public radio show, Women In Music with Laney Goodman. The show is in its tenth year of syndication nationwide, and the engineers at our satellite distribution center say we've got some of the best sound of any of the programs they distribute to over 400 stations each week. This is due in part to my "ear" -- I've always been able to hear subtle differences in audio, and I'm very, very picky about how things sound. And it's due in part to the power of Audacity -- not only does it let me achieve what I want, but I can do it quickly and without a lot of extra steps. When you're producing a new radio show each week and you have to get it out on time, the importance of being able to work quickly and efficiently is paramount.

When this unassuming but very powerful program called Audacity virtually took over my life, I was really under the gun. I had to convert the production of Women In Music from analog to digital... like it or not. Our satellite distributor, to whom we'd been sending digital audio tapes each week to encode, announced that soon they would only accept digital files, uploaded over the internet. Now, we'd been producing the show the "old fashioned" way for almost ten years, so we kicked and screamed and protested... to no avail. We had to change; we had no choice. We had almost 100 affiliates playing the show each week, so there was no way we could back out and cease production. We had to "upgrade our process," so to speak, and I had to find a way - right away - to convert our production process to all-digital. I bit the bullet and bought a 17-inch Apple Powerbook and a bunch of cables, and I connected it all to ye olde reliable mixing board.

All I needed now was an audio editor. I had a few months of lead time, to figure out how I was going to do that, and I can tell you I spent many a nervous hour sorting through all the different information about sound editors, red book quality recording, bit rates and sample rates, encoders and codexes, dB's and kHz. I was really getting worried, what with all the conflicting information -- this software would do one thing, but not another... and it cost $495. That software was "only" $300, but it would do something different. I downloaded demos and free trials and tried to make head or tail of the instructions, often to no avail. I didn't have a lot of time to spare, and I had to find a solution quickly. Then I noticed that the Powerbook I'd bought came with Audacity loaded in it.

Now, a couple of years before, I had been looking for a way to record some audio that was generated by JAWS, a computer screen reader for the visually impaired. I needed to find a quick and easy way to capture audio, without having to spend hours learning how to use the sound editor. By chance, I came across Audacity, downloaded it, fired it up, and in a matter of minutes, I had my sound file created. I shot off an e-mail to a friend of mine, raving about what a great program it was (and free, too!), and they agreed it was pretty cool. I continued to use Audacity to capture audio, on and off, for about a year, but I didn't give much thought to other uses of it. Until, that is, I had to come up with a way to take a successful national radio show to the next level. i wasn't sure Audacity was up to the task, but I thought, "What the heck - what can it hurt?" I fired up the program, fixed the settings and preferences, and started recording and editing audio right away - without a huge learning curve and without a lot of expense. When all was said and done, I had my solution. For a fraction of the cost of most other software packages I looked at. I couldn't have been happier.

Meanwhile, podcasting was on the rise, with folks jumping on the bandwagon early and getting podcasts out there. The number of podcasts available on Feedburner has been growing by 15% each month, while the number of people looking for podcasts has been growing by 20% each month. The demand is actually greater than the supply, which means an enormous opportunity for podcasting authors like me (and possibly you). Suddenly, there's a whole lot of content available, and there's even more demand. I got on the podcasting bandwagon, too, creating podcasts on my own podcasting platform, Podtopia.net, and creating a virtual book tour for my forthcoming book, Fuel: Memoirs of a Crisis. It's been a very exciting time for this frustrated author who has been pining for a way to get the word out about my work. Podcasting lets me do just that, and it lets me reach people who would have been out of reach only a few years ago.

Heaven... I'm in heaven... Downloading audio has never been easier for everyday people, and there's never been more choices to pick from... or people looking to choose. For someone who both creates and consumes audio on a daily basis, this brave new world of Audacity and MP3s and podcasting and publishing has been a dream come true. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember I'm really awake.

It really has been a series of happy accidents, this love affair between me and Audacity. That program has pulled my butt out of the fire more times than I can say, and it's so easy to use and has so many features, that I can't see any point in moving "up" to a premium editor. That's not to say I never will, but I like to keep things simple, and I like to keep my operations efficient. Understand, I can afford to buy just about any audio editor I please. But Audacity is the one I love. Ease will always win out over "rich feature sets", with me any day. And elegant simplicity will always take precedence over raw power. I have a very busy life, and I have a lot going on. The less time I need to spend, mastering the intricacies of software, the better. And for my money, Audacity fits the bill for me perfectly.

Now, some folks will say that Audacity doesn't have all the sophistication of, say, Adobe Audition or Garageband. But I don't need to strip out a gazillion different ambient noises from my recordings, and I don't need to do anything overly fancy. I like to keep my podcasts clean. I have my closely held trade secret techniques for making Women In Music sound as good as it does (it's still radio-only, not a podcast -- the licensing fees would be prohibitive). But for my podcasting, I can't say that my audio sounds any worse than that of podcasters who have more expensive equipment and more sophisticated editors. I just keep things clean, when I record. And it pays off.

So, that's the deal with me and Audacity. I continue to use it on a weekly basis, and I continue to do "heavy lifting" with it. I keep uncovering really cool things about it, and like any healthy relationship, I keep growing because of it. Without a doubt, my life would be a far more complicated place, if Audacity weren't in it, and I'd probably be a lot poorer, too. Not only in terms of money, but in terms of time and satisfaction, as well. On the surface, this little program is deceptively simple, but that just tells me it's well-designed, and the people putting the work into it, know what they're doing. They're more interested in getting the job done, than impressing upon the world the idea that they're going to get around to getting the job done. That, to me, speaks more to the quality of this software, than all the packaging in the world. And in this day and age, with all the hype and the promises and the fireworks and "rich feature sets", it's a wonderful and glorious relief to just find a program that does what it says it's going to. And does more than you expect it would.