Worse, it records only to Windows Media Audio, which means I have to convert the files to AAC or MP3 before I can play them on my iPod.īut Audacity lets me record directly to MP3 using the LAME encoder, which I've already got installed for another audio-conversion program. But Microsoft discontinued that XP-only product when it released Vista and doesn't support it anymore. Today, I use Microsoft's Digital Media Plus Pack to record my LP records to digital format. Reading through the documentation, I realized Audacity might be the perfect solution to a problem I've been facing myself. At the same time, it didn't burden him with features more geared toward budding musicians such as built-in instrument sounds or an on-screen keyboard. It let him see audio waveforms to figure out where the speaker stopped talking between slides, easily split the recording at those points, and clean up other extraneous noise from the track. Then he downloaded Audacity, and it fit the bill perfectly. I thought Apple's GarageBand might work, but he found it too opaque, and our office (like most) is PC-heavy, which would have complicated efforts to train other folks on how to do this job. One of my colleagues been looking for a tool to split recorded audio presentations into portions to go with the corresponding individual PowerPoint slides. But I'd completely forgotten about it until today. I've known people who have used it to manipulate sound for podcasts and the like. CNET has written several times over the years about Audacity, a free, general-purpose sound-editing tool.

Audacity programme