Audacity and podcasting, or, the attack of the 50ft professional
In reference to Julian Knowle's critique of Audacity, a few people have remarked to me that Audacity is really coming from the very low end 'beginner' base - the sort of people, non-professionals mostly, who are really getting into making podcasts.
Well, I'm not going to argue with that, it is after all Audacity's target market. There's been an excellent exchange in the comments between Matt Brubeck one of the Audacity developers and Julian, who wrote the review. As I said, Julian's critique is really from a professional's point of view. But why is this important?
Sooner or later, though, if podcasting is all it's cracked up to be, there will be a handful of people here who will end up making some sort of living - or at least recognition - out of it. And if it's that successfull, then you'll find that there's a whole bunch of audio professionals who'll get in on the game. Already, with the whole engadget crowd on the bandwagon, it's attracting some serious interest.
I think at points of disruption like this, is an opportunity for new softwares to displace the old. The 'old' here being Pro Tools and it's completely closed world view of the universe. So Audacity, if it gets it's act together, can capture a nascent market. Perhaps after it fixes its basic editing capacities it should add a 'publish podcast' feature which uses XML/RPC Metaweblog API to send the resulting audio mix to a podcast/blog server.
But in order to do this they have to able to capture the low end of the professional market. Because if this podcasting thing's got any legs then it's about one or two years (or less) before the professional market reaches us. Which is why I'm looking at using it for music publishing, as opposed to an offline talk-radio format apparently favored by most podcasters. In many ways, I'm the *vanguard* of that professional market, looking to outplay my bigger and slower competitors in a virgin territory.