Audacity is an open-source program for recording and editing audio/sounds developed by volunteers and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). You are allowed to use the program, study how it works, improve it and share it with others because it is totally free. And it is available on various operating systems like Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and some other operating systems.
Through this tool, you can record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings for cd, Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files, Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together, Change the speed or pitch of a recording and alot more.
Audacity can record live audio through a microphone, mixer or digitize recordings from cassette tapes, vinyl records, or minidiscs. It can also capture streaming audio on selected sound cards. And an Audacity user can import sound files for editing and combination with other sound files and allows exporting of sounds in different file formats. There are other features like sound effects, sound quality, plugins, analysis and more.
And during the Google Summer of Code, four project by students were made for the Audacity software. Google Summer of Code 2008 concluded on September 2, 2008and 83% of our 1125 student participants successfully completed their projects. The four projects are FFmpeg Support, new GUI classes, on-demand/level-of-detail file loading and sticky labels.
FFmpeg Support increases the range of file formats that can be imported and exported.
new GUI classes for future use in displaying audio tracks.
on-demand/level-of-detail file loading for near-instant loading and editing of uncompressed files.
sticky labels that stay with the audio through cut and paste.
Audacity was also awarded as Infoworld's 2008 Best Open Source Software Awards for the sound editing category.
Audacity was chosen as part of PC World's 100 Best Products of 2008.
Audacity was also listed in PC Magazine's Hall of Fame.
Audacity ranked first on the polls conducted in linuxquestions.org about Audio Authoring Application of the Year.
Audacity was also chosen to become part of SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Awards as Best Project for Multimedia.
