Wow; I was one of the first developers to work on Audacity way back in 2001, but I haven't kept up with its development in a long time. It's exciting to see a new major release.
I'm always amazed and proud at how widely I see Audacity being used. Most recently I spent the 5 weeks as a juror on a criminal trial, and I saw Audacity installed on the prosecutor's computer.
It sure has been a long time, hasn't it? Audacity 2.0 has been in development since 2005 (in form of the "unstable" 1.3.x series)!
haberman and I first met when I started contributing to Audacity more than a decade ago. Later he helped me apply for a job at Amazon.com and we became teammates. Since then we've drifted away from Audacity development, both left Amazon to work in startups, and haberman is now at Google while I ended up at Mozilla, but we are still good friends and keep in touch -- and also debate technical minutia on HN. :)
Audacity has always been short on developers for a project with such a large userbase, so development has often been slow. But the contributor community was one of the friendliest I've been involved in, thanks in large part to the great stewardship of Audacity's creator Dominic Mazzoni. If you use Audacity, please consider checking out the code and fixing a bug or two!
Yep! Not to mention Dominic also helped me get the jobs at both Amazon and Google. Working on Audacity in college and meeting all these people was such a great experience and opened up so many doors. One time I even picked up Monty of Ogg Vorbis fame from the airport to go to an Audacity Hackathon.
Audacity is AWESOME!!! It's perfect for removing background hissing on cheap mics.
For any of you who have a lot of hissing or humming coming from your mic when you record podcasts or demo videos for your startups. Audacity can take it out in just a few clicks using its noise removal filter. Just remember, whenever you start recording an audio track, wait 5 seconds before you start talking, and then use those 5 seconds of hissing to build a profile using the noise removal. And apply that to the whole track. My brother and I were blown away at how well it took all the hissing out. I recorded on a $9 Walmart mike and it sounded like studio quality work. Crisp, clean voice, pure hiss-less silence between sentences.
Thank you and all of its developers. Audacity is a perfect example of easy to use, easy to learn, open source software.
Totally. I use it for all my podcasts. I'd advise more time if you can spare it though (10-15s seems ideal). And it works great on aircon/consistent bg noise too.
I'm always amazed and proud at how widely I see Audacity being used. Most recently I spent the 5 weeks as a juror on a criminal trial, and I saw Audacity installed on the prosecutor's computer.