Audacity 2.0.5 Review:
Audacity is a free, open source audio recorder ad editor for Windows, which can record live audio through a microphone or mixer, or digitize recordings from cassette tapes, vinyl records, or minidiscs. With some sound cards, it can also capture streaming audio. Its list of features is so long that many professional users have adopted it and used it in countless audio projects. The processing speed is decent, to say the least and the results are of superior audio quality. No matter what you want to do with audio recordings, Audacity has tools to help you – recording live audio, cutting and trimming, managing all aspects of audio podcast production, adding of countless post-processing effects, normalization, fading, multi-track mixing, noise removal, audio spectrum analysis, conversion and much more.
Audacity features support for importing, processing and exporting WAV, FLAC, AIFF, AU and OGG Vorbis files. Bundled with a large array of plugins and effects, this software is ready for audio recording/playback, track mixing and audio spectrum analysis. Audacity can record multiple channels simultaneously at high sample rates from microphones, USB or Firewire devices. Sound editing can be performed via basic Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete operations. Mixing can be achieved from multiple clips, while the Draw feature allows altering individual sample points.
Records and plays audio filesAudacity 2.0.5 Features:
- Import MPEG audio (including MP2 and MP3 files)
- Edit your audio files by cutting, copying, pasting, and mixing them
- Large files can be edited fairly quickly
- Change the pitch without altering the tempo, or vice-versa.
- Various plug-ins support
- Supports various file formats like WAV, AIFF, AU, and Ogg Vorbis
- Record and edit 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit (floating point) samples.
- Add different effects like echo, phaser, wahwah, reverse, and more
- (OS X) Crashes when importing audio files are fixed.
- (OS X) Files can now be opened using Finder “Open with”, and by double-click or dragging to the Audacity icon.
- (OS X) Audio Unit plug-ins are not loaded until used. This makes Audacity start faster and avoids startup crashes due to incompatible plug-ins.
- Can be used to convert old tapes into digital media
- (Windows) On a very few machines, the Windows WDM-KS low latency host caused Audacity 2.0.4 to hang or the computer to crash. WDM-KS has been removed from Audacity 2.0.5 while we work on safely enabling this host. WDM-KS will still be available for testing in the Windows alpha development builds.
- (Windows) Fixed a bug where Audacity would not record until the current input was reselected.
- (Linux) You can now navigate through an effect or other dialog using keyboard TAB.
Audacity 2.0.5 Keyboard Preferences:
- Change Pitch displayed corrupted values when reducing pitch or editing “from” Frequency. Detection was very inaccurate at high sample rates.
- Bass Boost no longer clips if the track contains 32-bit audio.
- Shortcuts for Generators, Effects and Analyzers were not exported. All imported shortcut changes were discarded.
- Equalization curves were corrupted in Graphic EQ mode after switching to/from Draw Curves or after running the effect then reopening it.
- Accessibility: ENTER did not toggle selectedness of a label track unless a label was selected.
- Numerous other interface fixes.
- Auto Duck was excessively slow on older machines.
- (Windows) Exported MP3 comments tags were not seen by Windows programs.
- (Windows and OS X) Audacity crashed if you used system quit before file import was complete.
Audacity 2.0.5 Changes and Improvements:
- Change Tempo now supports fractional BPM.
- Plot Spectrum now supports FFT sizes up to 65536.
- WAV files now support “Album Title”, “Track Number” and “Genre” LIST INFO tags and also support ID3 tags.
- New “Reverb” effect to replace GVerb, based on the original “Freeverb”.
- New View > Go to Selection Start and Go to Selection End commands.
- New “Align End to End” command to append existing tracks to each other.
- Handle a bug in older iPods or some OS X applications that cause them to refuse AIFF files whose metadata contains an uneven number of characters.
- (Windows Vista and later) You can now record computer playback by choosing the new “Windows WASAPI” host in Device Toolbar then a “loopback” input.
- Modules Preferences replaced with a dialog on launch of Audacity enabling you to choose which modules to load.
- (Windows) Added support for “Windows WDM-KS” host which can provide very low latencies if you reduce “Audio to Buffer” in Recording Preferences.
Audacity 2.0.5 Download for Windows
Audacity 2.0.5 Download for Mac
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