HotPicks
SOUND EDITOR
Audacity
Version: 2.4.1 Web: www.audacityteam.org
Shortly after Mike Bedford’s excellent hands-on Audacity tutorial in LXF264, the well-known audio application gained a significant new release (and also turned 20-years old back in May 2020). The new Audacity 2.4 is the same old Audacity that we know and love, but benefited from a range of improvements that we want to cover here.
One new addition is the Time Panel that’s located below the Waveform (note that the size and placement of the panel can vary). When using Audacity keep an eye on the screen from a distance – it can be handy to make the Time Panel larger and more readable. The drop-down Waveform menu now sports a Multiview check box, which enables you to display the Spectrogram and Waveform panels at the same time. Previously, you had to choose which one to have on show.
There are plenty of smaller improvements to the program, together with a range of new filters. These all help to reinforce Audacity’s reputation as the leading open source choice for recording podcasts and speech. The newly introduced Loudness Normalization tool and the Noise Gate filter prove to be handy when editing voice recordings. Audacity now makes it even simpler to eliminate unwanted sounds, fix audible defects, apply volume threshold, remove periods of silence and carry out other common sound-mastering tasks.
Although many people use Audacity just to record something and then export the results as WAV/MP3/ OGG files, the editor is capable of much more. Explore the creative ways of transforming the sound by browsing the Effect menu, and don’t overlook the multi-track capability of Audacity. In fact, this feature is useful for mixing several tracks, superimposing one sound over the other. Alternatively, why not add some background music to liven up a jargon-heavy tech podcast. Regardless of how you want to use Audacity, this editor is a fully-fledged sound processing package that can handle pretty much anything you throw at it, from noise removal to fixing ID3 tags.
SNIPPING TOOL
Ksnip
Version: 1.6.2 Web:https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip
Three years ago, we said that was a clone for Linux. These days is a mature project: there’s so much extra functionality and reworked tools on offer that it deserves an updated review.
