Audio Software Tips

Subscriber John Mood sent me this:

I have been using Audacity for a few months. It is a very excellent audio editor! Coupled with Total Recorder, it’s a killer combination. Audacity is free, and Total Recorder is very inexpensive to license.
I found both quite on purpose, having an ancient sound file that needed cleaning up (noise, pops, general fuzziness). Audacity can open and edit and apply a wide range of filters and effects (Normalization, echo, and over 20 others). The file was a copy of Orson Wells’ “War of The Worlds” broadcast. It did such a good job on “War of The Worlds”, I had to undo two layers of filtering just to make it believable. It honestly sounded too good.
It can be found at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. It’s open source, free, and better than some of the professional tools I have used at work. It complements Total Recorder and is now indispensable to me. It’s so good, if it went pro/shareware, I’d pay for it. I download and try a lot of shareware, and Total Recorder and Audacity are both worth a look see. I bought Total Recorder about 3 versions ago. Total Recorder grabs anything (even streaming audio – it eliminates the transmission delay silences) sound wise running through your system. Audacity is great for fine ‘polishing’ sound, music, and speech recording.
Real handy programs. Total Recorder does a super job on webcasts and the like. It can record right off of WinAmp, MusicMatch, and iTunes radio stations, listening for you and saving to MP3 (with the addition of Lame_enc.dll).

You can reach John by email at john@chipspeaking.com or visit his web site at http://www.chipspeaking.com/

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