Softpedia freeware pick receives major update

Jan 28, 2009 15:07 GMT  ·  By

Audacity is a fast, cross-platform multitrack audio editor and recorder that supports WAV, AIFF, Ogg, and MP3 formats. Using the software, you can envelope-edit your audio files, do a bit of mixing using built-in effects and plug-ins and, if you mess up, at any point, you have unlimited undo.

The free audio editor for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later (Leopard 10.5.4 and lower) is aimed at audiophiles, and fans of music-making solutions, such as Ableton Live. You can use this software as a sidekick to record and play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and more. This makes things easier for the user than having to fire up a big program that does so much more, and confuses them with all the available options. Built-in effects include Bass Boost, Wahwah, and Noise Removal; it also supports VST plug-in effects.

The latest version of Audacity for Mac, Audacity X 1.3.7, delivers exciting new features, as well as bug fixes and tweaks. Speaking of platform-specific bug fixes, developer Dominic Mazzoni reveals that he was able to resolve the following issues on Mac and Linux platforms.

· Spurious clipping at start of playback · Labels did not accept certain legal characters · Shortcuts did not work after running effects · Project Rate did not change to respect rate of first imported file if that rate was unsupported.

Mac OS X-specific fixes include the crash resizing project window, menu items became inactive or visibly corrupted, File > Open dialogue did not always work on OS X 10.4, impossibility to set independent Command and Control shortcuts that shared the same key, freeze importing uncompressed files via On-Demand, portable settings not being picked up (instead, settings were taken from the default location) and fixed unavailability of FFMpeg installer.

New Features include a Full Screen mode (F11), high-quality "Sliding Time Scale/Pitch Shift" effect, Audio Contrast Analyzer for testing audio on the Internet for WCAG2 accessibility compliance and more. Other changes such as improved latency correction and grouping of effects have also been made, Mazzoni says.

Download Audacity X (Free)

Audacity is a Softpedia Freeware Pick!