Linux Multimedia Hacks

Edit Audio with Audacity

Record, crop, rearrange, and save audio with the cross-platform Audacity tool.

Often when you take a picture or write a paper, the first effort isn’t perfect. Usually there are changes you need to make, whether cropping pictures or changing wording, before everything is perfect. Recorded audio is often the same. There are often periods of silence you need to remove from your recording, mistakes you need to edit, or other changes to make before the track is how you want it. Another more recent use of audio editing is podcasting, or the process of creating audio content that you then share and link to with RSS feeds so people can listen at their leisure. [ Hacks #86 and #87 ] discuss podcast programs under Linux, or you could reference O’Reilly’s Podcasting Hacks for more detailed information. Whatever your reason for editing audio, one particularly useful tool for performing these kinds of edits is Audacity.

Audacity is a cross-platform audio-editing program that runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac platforms. It is popular enough that you will likely be able to find a package for it for your distribution, but if not, you can download the latest release from the official web site at http://audacity.sourceforge.net. When you run Audacity for the first time, the interface that appears might seem a bit intimidating if you haven’t worked with audio-editing software before. Audacity has a lot of powerful features that could take many pages to describe, but for the ...