In a music mailing list I'm on, a senior music and sound design lecturer and active musician has been discussing his evaluation of various open source tools for use in their university studio and labs. His report about Audacity was absolutely scathing. The key quote I think is "I would find this tool almost impossible to deploy into even a beginner's lab, as it lacks the simple features which allow people to grasp some of the basic principles of non-linear audio editing and production." It appears that open source audio software has a fair way to go before it truly competes with professional editors like Pro Tools or Nuendo. Maybe you do simply, get what you pay for.

Reproduced below with permission.

From: Julian Knowles <xxxxxxxxxxxxx@mac.com>
Date: Mon Jan 3, 2005 5:31:40 PM Australia/Sydney

After this morning's email reading, I was genuinely enthused to do the rounds of the open source community in a renewed search for an audio editor/production environment which could at least be a viable substitute at the low end for teaching purposes. I seriously want to find one.

I downloaded 'Audacity', because open source geek friends keep telling me that it's 'great'.. It is platform agnostic, open-source, free, and supports VST plugins.... Sounds good so far.. I then spent the last 2 hours mucking around with it.

Man... what a disappointment. It has about the same level of functionality as SoundEdit 16 on a Mac from the early to mid nineties, albeit with proper undo. Here are some of its limitations

1) No real-time FX.... only file based processing with a 2-3 second preview. GUIs for VST plugins also not working at present, resulting in very non-intuitive parameter lists and generic faders.

2) No 'region' capturing, or clip based editing... you have to chop into the waveform and do copy/pastes to make a simple loop.. no way of slipping clips around in a track - you can only slip the whole track in time.... very SoundEdit 16, very primitive, unusable.

3) Every time you import a new audio file, Audacity creates a new track. This is annoying. There is no 'audio clips bin' like most basic editors and no dragging and dropping of clips into the timeline from a 'library', which is a fairly basic requirement for any sort of editing.

4) You can cut and paste selected audio from one track to another, but when you paste, Audacity automatically butts the copied audio up against the previous and you are not able to paste at a point beyond the end of the previous audio, nor slip the pasted audio in the timeline after you have pasted it. The only way of creating a gap between the previous audio and the audio you wish to paste is to 'generate silence' from a menu before pasting. Once you have done this, you still can't easily vary the silence gap or slip the position of the pasted audio. To shorten the gap (bring the pasted clip earlier in the session) you have to select some silence and 'delete' it.... then the pasted clip slips back closer to the previous.... You can't do proper editing this way and you will end up tearing your hair out fairly swiftly!!

5) There is no such thing as a cross-fade edit in a track. This makes cutting and pasting audio between tracks unworkable. To achieve cross-fades (even small ones) you need to use two tracks and write volume automation on the outgoing and incoming audio. I cannot see how you are able to do any real editing in this kind of environment. Even simple 2 track editing becomes difficult.

6) No video clip import/sync

7) No midi file editing or playback, or support for VST instruments

8) A frustratingly clunky volume automation editor, where you can't nail the break points properly without zooming in to micro level.

9) No decent navigation keyboard shortcuts, like for example jumping to the beginning or end of a selection when zoomed in, or parking the cursor at the end of a clip etc... or selecting from a point to the beginning or end of a clip. The basic editing necessities aren't there - you need basic keyboard shortcuts for navigation and selection... if you are expected to shift click, drag and zoom everything, you will go completely crazy in a short space of time.

I then went to the Audacity Wiki server to look at some of the discussion... There is a development wishlist, which seems to be arse about with some of the basic issues above not even appearing... There are also occasional examples of excessive hubris such as this Audacity developers statement about Pro Tools in the comparisons page - "[pro tools is] Cumbersome at times, but the basic functions of Audacity closely emulate those of Pro Tools",

I don't think so pal.... (please see list of limitations above!!!!) and i really want to believe you!

There are a couple of good things, such as support for 96khz/32bit, capacity to have files of different sample rates in a session, mp3 and ogg vorbis export, 'batch like' processing for exports and an undo history list - but that's about it.

Some may say... well what can you expect for a free, open-source tool? Well, fair enough, the price is right and the politics are too, but the truth of the matter is that I would find this tool almost impossible to deploy into even a beginner's lab, as it lacks the simple features which allow people to grasp some of the basic principles of non-linear audio editing and production. Herein lies the frustration of the exercise, I think. It is difficult to generate enthusiasm for open-source tools if the experience is a really frustrating one. As for me, I would rather use the lite version of Bias Peak over this for simple 2 track editing tasks, and i really hate Peak. I might use it for some ogg vorbis or mp3 exports.. but that would be it.

the search continues...... meanwhile the software corporations bring home the bacon.

Responses[5]

Posted by scotartt on 4 January 2005 10:26:01 #

metaluna monster (non-vocal mix) I'm not sure how to describe this, a little bit of drum and bass, a little bit dancehall, a little bit of electro. There is a vocal mix which I'm never getting around to mixing because some of the vocals need to be re-recorded and I just never can will myself (or convince lisa) into redoing it. Anyway enjoy this mix.

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Posted by scotartt on 4 January 2005 10:05:03 # Attachment