Audacity - What a pain!

[janmulder]

I used Audacity a few years ago but soon grew out of its many restrictions. If you intend to do audio file editing more often then you may well end up in the same boat ... i.e. outgrowing it quickly.

Audacity is a very good editing program but the two main things that got me in the end was the fact that it doesn't edit WAV files directly ... requiring you to import and export all the time (but I could live with this), and secondly, you can't preview VST effects live ... adjusting effect parameters without being able to hear at the time what changes it will have seems to me an unnecessarily laborious task ... and if you are serious about adding effects like EQ, Reverb etc to your audio this is a major downer (I couldn't live with it). (Disclaimer: I haven't used it for a couple of years so I don't know if they addressed these things in the meantime)

I knew I'd have to change over to something more capable eventually ... so I decided to just jump ship sooner than later.

There are quite a few WAV editors out there such as the extremely popular free WAV editor called Wavosaur. I haven't used it, but it looks more like something you are looking for.

With regards to Reaper ... this is a very capable piece of software with an seemingly endless depth of features. However, you don't have to use the features you don't need.

And to add fades and effects it is really amazingly simple. There are loads of tutorials around and I think you'd crack it in just one evening.

[janmulder]

... almost forgot, you can actually slow down the audio playback in Reaper. I don't think it's how most people approach audio editing though. I usually try to zoom in on the part of the audio file I'm interested in and then I find the exact position visually looking at the waveform.

[YamaYairi]

Originally Posted by Dakedi

I used Audacity a few years ago but soon grew out of its many restrictions. If you intend to do audio file editing more often then you may well end up in the same boat ... i.e. outgrowing it quickly.

Audacity is a very good editing program but the two main things that got me in the end was the fact that it doesn't edit WAV files directly ... requiring you to import and export all the time (but I could live with this), and secondly, you can't preview VST effects live ... adjusting effect parameters without being able to hear at the time what changes it will have seems to me an unnecessarily laborious task ... and if you are serious about adding effects like EQ, Reverb etc to your audio this is a major downer (I couldn't live with it). (Disclaimer: I haven't used it for a couple of years so I don't know if they addressed these things in the meantime)

I knew I'd have to change over to something more capable eventually ... so I decided to just jump ship sooner than later.

There are quite a few WAV editors out there such as the extremely popular free WAV editor called Wavosaur. I haven't used it, but it looks more like something you are looking for.

With regards to Reaper ... this is a very capable piece of software with an seemingly endless depth of features. However, you don't have to use the features you don't need.

And to add fades and effects it is really amazingly simple. There are loads of tutorials around and I think you'd crack it in just one evening.

Did you try the Preview feature for the effects?

[janmulder]

As I mentioned in my disclaimer ... it was a couple of years ago when I used it. At that time the latest version didn't have any preview.

[janmulder]

OK ... I've just had a look at the Audacity Soundforge site and the latest version features and there is now a live preview of VST effects ... so you can disregard that part of my original post.