Hot Picks

AUDIO EDITOR

Audacity

Version: 3.0

Web: www.audacityteam.org

Version 3.0 of the renowned Audacity is finally out, following last summer’s 2.4.2 update. For those unfamiliar with the program, Audacity is a multi-track audio editor, which enables you to master a podcast by combining several tracks in one project (such as the vocals and background music), remove noise, apply reverb and other effects, and more. It’s a high-quality open source application that’s suitable for both hobbyist and professional tasks.

One of Audacity’s features makes it possible to manually select input and output sound devices, enabling you to avoid PulseAudio in favour of ALSA if necessary. The interface contains a chunky main toolbar at the top with the track area below it. Audacity looks clean and uncluttered, yet it has an impressive number of tools, effects and plug-ins for sound processing (check under the Effects menu). The GUI is based on wxWidgets linked with GTK. Interestingly, this hot-baked Audacity 3.0 release is still compiled against the GTK2 version of wxWidgets rather than GTK3, due to some redraw bugs in the latter. If at the time of reading you’re still missing a precompiled package of Audacity 3.0 and decide to build it from source, be prepared to set up the Audacity-patched wX3.1 beforehand.

The latest release has a range of new features, such as the new AUP3 internal format for storing projects. This format makes use of an SQLite3 database for better performance of heavy multi-track projects and provides predictable access times when handling lengthy recordings, regardless of what kind of storage device is used.

One headline change is the new default file format. The new AUP3 stores project data in a single file, which is a big improvement over the multi-file mess that used to annoy Audacity users. The Noise Gate filter is now much more precise and efficient, the new Label Sounds tool enables you to tag parts of the projects, while a collection of smaller fixes and improvements await both long-term Audacity fans and newcomers.

VIDEO PLAYER

Clapper

Version: 0.1.0 Web:https://github.com/Rafostar/clapper

first we had some.