I don't think the author tried to get any real work done with Audacity. It's really not up to par with either Sound Forge or Wavelab.
I really had a terrible time last time I checked out Audacity.
I understand it's free of charge and you can definitely get some work done with it (if you aren't in a hurry).
The thing is I just don't think open source is competitive in that kind of market.
First of all: very limited export and import. I like my audio editor to be a hub where I can switch from one format to the other.
UI : I really don't like the UI I'm sorry to say I find it very ugly. I also have the feeling it takes a significant higher number of operations to trim, zoom, detrim, cancel, copy, etc. Maybe with time I could cope with it if I didn't have the choice. Ah, wait, I have a choice. :) In Wavelab you have a virtual rack in which you can plug in the VST FX, and tweak it in real time. It's really well done and the visual feedback is very helpful.
Effects : it's just not delivered with decent effects (where is the multi-band compression?) and good VST effects (such as the Waves Diamond Bundle) are expensive (> 3000 €). If you spend for 3000 € of FX, I guess you can spend another 400 € for an audio editor.
But the real show stopper was that Audacity doesn't support the audio output I need, that is ASIO. I need ASIO output to get the sub 40 ms output latency. I don't think it supports WASAPI either which would be a work around.
For home usage, Sound Forge Audio Studio is only 35 € and in my opinion much better than Audacity. You can burn you recording directly from the software, in Audacity you have to export to wav and then burn the track (unless it changed).
Audacity is clunky but gets the work done when it comes to simple editing. Not really indeed very good for a musician since it misses useful realtime feedback on effects, but for a Dad looking to record / edit / convert his vinyls into mp3s it works perfectly.
As for why you'd want to have low latency on a sample editing software, I do not really understand why. Unless you want to record and process effect automations. For that purpose, why not use something more like an audio sequencer? (Reaper -- pretty cheap -- or Logic Audio, Cubase, Ableton Live)
As for exports, Audacity supports ogg, mp3 and flac, which is pretty good. But no direct burn operation.
Who burns CDs nowadays, though?
In summary I think the only crime that Audacity commits is to look and sell itself as more advanced than what it really is: a simple sample editing software. So bad marketing and an incorrect apparent focus on musicians.
Low latency is interesting when you're tweaking the VST in real time and want to see how it affects your recording. With enough CPU power and a good audio card, this is doable even with a complex stack of effects.
I guess it could also be important when using external processors.
Yet this has nothing to do with low latency. You can have a decent realtime preview with ~120ms latency, which I use as a limit for instantaneousness.
Low-latency is good for performance, as in, for performing live. And that's it (Then again ask any church organ player about latency.. He has ton of it)
All true. Ardour and Rosegarden are better as far as multi-tracking goes, but still. The killer app (but not open source) in this space is Reaper, which runs on anything, 32/64 bit, free to use and cheap to buy, yadda yadda. For real work I use Adobe Audition.
There is a load of fabulous OS stuff out there for hardcore geeks, from PD to Jack. But for those who are seeking free-as-in-beer software to get things done, open source is not the way to go. It's even worse with video - I hugely admire Cinelerra, but would not dream of using it for anything important.
Woah!! + many internets, and I wish I could upvote you twice. I work in this area (kitchen TV right now) and had heard of the project a while back but forgot about it - this looks superb. The popular commercial alternatives (EP/Movie Magic and Gorilla) are made of fail, and I'm not such a big fan of Final Draft either.
After randomly dumping a bunch of day job (unscripted TV location plan data) and personal (2 feature scripts) into it, you've got yourself an evangelist.
Thanks much to you (and dtf) for the feedback. Really appreciated. We don't get a lot of press (you'd think that whoever wrote the piece about open source media apps would have at least Googled around a bit beforehand...), but the WOM is working nicely.
Only four piece of software mentioned. Of the four, only Audacity and
Blender are really about working with Video and Audio. The rest are a
format transcoder (Simple Theora Encoder) and a general purpose media
player and broadcaster (VLC)
So in summary, none none of them are really about editing video.
The article even failed to mention you can almost do that with Blender, but learning a complete and thus quite complicated 3d suite to edit your vacations' videos is a bit "much."
I know nothing about this area, but Mums just asked me to help her and her business partner put together a DVD demonstrating their healthcare treatment techniques. They are "leading edge" in their field and need visual before and after documentation to convince others, particularly the mainstream medical community, that their results are real. To be clear, this isn't "crystal magnets and stuff"; it's advanced physical therapy and neuro-physiological techniques invoking neuro-plasticity and the like.
Nothing too fancy required of the video, except that faces need to be blurred. Does anyone know of an open source / low or zero cost editor that can do that reliably?
Once, some years in the past, she spent some thousands on a professionally produced videotape, but was underwhelmed with the results and a bit overwhelmed at the price tag given the relative simplicity of her editing needs (although I can see face blurring as a multi-hour "target shoot" kind of exercise, for the editor). Thus, this time her "computer literate" son has been drafted.
EDIT: She works a lot with disadvantaged children. Good work, but there's not tons of money in it. So, she's not just being cheap. And as I'm between jobs, I'm avoiding expenses, myself.
* Ardour (http://ardour.org/) - a digital audio workstation
* Cinelerra (http://cinelerra.org/) - for video editing
* Snd (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/snd.html) - a sound editor scriptable in scheme, ruby or forth.