Audacity Saves The Day

I’m putting the finishing touches on a fundraising video this week and am down to finessing the soundtrack. The range of quality on the source material I have is pretty wide – some excellent and some barely useable.

I recently upgraded my editing software at work with the Adobe Production Studio Bundle and I’m learning the ins and outs of Adobe Audition and the new audio tools in Premiere Pro. But, I needed a quick and easy piece of audio editing software to do things like remove/reduce breath sounds and trim a little off of some dialog.

Open Source to the Rescue

I found Audacity. This is a great opensource software package that does exactly what I need. It took me about 2 seconds to figure out how the envelope tool would allow me to adjust the volume on a track – it’s all visual, you just grab the envelope and drag it up or down. The output sounds great.

There’s a lot more here than what I’m using. Audacity will do full fledged multitrack recording and uses VST plugins.

If you need a great little sound utility, check it out! It’s cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux and works great.