Well, perhaps not. But a few quick words of (virtual) love and respect for the developers and maintainers of Audacity, a free, open-source audio editing aoftware. With the basic Audacity package, I've recently been able to transfer some old interviews from cassette to a more immediatedly stable digital medium. And more: with Audacity, I was also able, and without the intervention of several synchronizing-impaired acquaintances, to create my own "complete" mix of The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka!.
The more enterprising -- and more soncially imaginative -- among you either will already be familiar with this product, or might care to measure it up against Apple's GarageBand or GoldWave. I'd certainly be interested to know if any working musicians were relying on this or a similar shareware application, whether for truly creative work (say, running the output from an emulator through it), or at least for for production. I'd also be interested to read any thoughts on or experiences related to recording directly to disc (computer) as opposed to tape.
Meanwhile, my next Audacity project will be to scrub some of that reverb off a few old Phil Spector records (exact titles TBD)... just for the heck of it. I want to x-ray those frescoes; I want to peer behind the Wall of Noise.
~ Joe Milazzo
Posted by joe on December 30, 2004 12:53 PMJoe,
I have been using Audacity to take away tape hiss from my field recordings from the Sierra Tarahumara originally on MD then remixed to reel to reel. The noise removal tool is very good for this. For remixes the program has proven more promising than delivering, as I have lost several projects owing to a file extension crisis it or Windows goes into. Audacity saves numerous small files of sound (anyone interested in the whole "granular" field will find their material more or less atomized for them by the program--not to the level of sample but at least to small wave forms) and it must reassemble them in proper order when it opens the project again. If one or more of these get misplaced, you're project is more or less undeliverable, unless you want to paste it bit by bit (figuratively speaking) and glue in the missing one. The only way to make use of it has been to do a mix and then export immediately as Wav. Every save in Audacity has managed to lose files and then claim it cannot find the data folder to which the information has been saved by it and where the files should be coming from! There must be a fix for this bug, but I haven't asked about it yet. It's a useful tool overall with some very nice sounding plug-ins (which I don't use for my music, btw) but the fact that it saves in a file format no other program can read makes it a bit messy. I am extremely thankful that it has been made available however. To have 4 separate channels (limit of my sound card) of distinct sound is a marvel. And they give you an option to export as OGG Vorbis--a direction I think it is good to move in. Am I wrong or is it the case that every edit you make actually creates another file for the project? The more you do it in it then the more unstable your situation becomes.
Jeff -- I've not encountered this problem with Audacity, but I've not worked with it too much, either. I am not surprised to learn that the application creates lots of temporary files, and that project files can get hairy. Typical of Windows, I want to say... Perhaps exacerbated by some file-naming problems? Proprietary file formats are always an issue, too. Wish I knew a work-around there.
And for those wondering what the heck Ogg Vorbis files are... http://www.vorbis.com/
Stepping back to look at it all from a big picture, though, it is amazing to consider that the demands and needs of artists / creative types -- whether they be musicians, visual artists, writers or (dare I say) gamers -- have driven so much innovation in the realm of "computing". To the extent that I wonder why we still call these machines "computers".
Certainly not something Babbage anticipated.
Posted by: Joe at January 3, 2005 2:11 PMInterestingly enough, in the news recently...
Last American Audio Tape Maker Closes
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at January 14, 2005 11:15 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................