Audacity wins an award...

... for intelligent file management. That’s version 1.3.0beta.

I discovered that editing a 123 megabyte FLAC file creates over a gigabyte of work files. Unfortunately, /tmp on this laptop is a gigabyte.

However, Audacity wins a prize by making the work directory configurable, which allowed me to put it in /var/tmp/ long enough to do the editing.

I must also mention that it’s pretty good at click-free cutting & stuff like that, & that the menu entries show practice.

For example, one of the Edit menu items is Trim, which lops off the data either side of the selected area. It only saves a few seconds a go for not having to do two selects & cuts, but it’s amazing how much that simple addition smooths out my work-flow.

I leavce a little trailer for a noise sample, then select the sound “inside” that to de-noise, then Edit/Trim to keep just the filtered sound. It’s one of the few ops that makes me wish for a 4GHz dual-CPU laptop. (-:

Thanks, Dominic Mazzoni & team.

Oh, yes, & thanks to that noisy European bloke (actually a Sydney-sider) for getting me hooked on it at LCA2005. Looking at the sites, it seems that Conrad “Kfish” Parker has moved along, software-wise, which is a good thing, but thanks for this useful addiction, anyway. (-:

PS, I remember Sweep (or something very much like it) being shown off at LCA2003 here in Perth. Good to see that still going well.

Comments

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