Audacity is an open source, freely distributed, cross-platform and easy-to-use software project designed from the offset to act as an audio editor and recorder for personal computers running any GNU/Linux distribution or the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Audacity is a very powerful software, it is used by many professional musicians who want a free software alternative for analyzing, editing and recording audio tracks.
Features at a glance
With Audacity, users can record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together, as well as to change the speed or pitch of a recording. In addition, the software contains many plugins and effects, among which we can mention Echo, Paulstretch (extreme stretch), Phaser, Reverb, Reverse, Truncate Silence and Wahwah.
Offers a powerful plugin architecture
Audacity comes by default with a vast amount of features, but the most important one is the powerful plugin architecture, which allows users to extend its default functionality through add-ons that can be written by users.
Under the hood and availability
The application is written entirely in the C++ programming language and uses the GTK+ GUI toolkit for its graphical user interface under GNU/Linux and BSD systems, where it is available for download only as a sources archive, requiring users to configure and compile the app prior to installation, but it can be easily installed from the default software repositories of many Linux distributions.
Supported OSes and architectures
The software has been successfully tested under several GNU/Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, openSUSE or Mageia, various BSD flavors like FreeBSD, as well as on the commercial Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. At the moment, it runs perfect on both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures.
