Best free sound recorders
Best free audio editing software
(This item was prepared by Joe Bennett, one of the volunteer category editors for my new wiki-style website)
With podcasting more popular than ever, more and more people are now looking for easy ways to record, edit, mix, and save sound on their PCs.
In fact, people don't want to simply record only their voices for their podcasts. They are now making entire downloadable shows that are edited and mixed to such quality, that they sound almost as good as the professionals.
Software that can do all this editing has been, historically, very expensive (like the $349 Adobe Audition) but two excellent free products are now available that will give you that professional touch you desire for your recordings.
Audacity [1] does all the recording and editing I need, and is much simpler and faster to use than a lot of pay products. It allows you to select and apply a noise profile and, just as easily, remove it. According to the web site, Audacity will also, "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 and change the speed or pitch of a recording." Audacity supports plugins for LADSPA, Nyquist and VST. There is also support for real-time monitoring, though it is not enabled by default.
Note: Audacity supports VST plugins but this support is not "built-in". Because the code is not 100% open source, it must be kept separate for licensing reasons. The "VST Enabler" is available for download from the Audacity website (See link in the "Product Specifications" section below), and is available for Windows, Mac OS-X and for Linux. Support is limited for the time being, but full support is coming.
Kristal Audio Engine [2] is a powerful multi-track recorder, audio sequencer and mixer - ideal for anyone wanting to get started with recording, mixing and mastering digital audio. According to their website, "It is designed as a modular system. The main application provides a mixing console, while the audio sequencer, live audio input and so on are loaded as separate Plug-Ins."
It supports an ASIO audio driver, which may be appealing to those who are concerned with latency while implementing multi-track recording. It's based on a 32-bit floating point audio engine that can handle sample rates of 44 to 192 kHz with word sizes of 16, 24 or 32 bit. It comes with a three-band parametric EQ and supports WAVE, AIFF, FLAC, and OGG Vorbis file formats. It can only handle a maximum of 16 audio tracks, though the web site mentions an upcoming version 2 that will handle more tracks, as well as support for MIDI, virtual instruments, and a wider range of VST plugins.
Like all media editing programs, Kristal requires a modern fast PC. Don't even think about using it with a sub 1Ghz machine.
Wavosaur [3] weighs in at a total uncompressed file size of 491K, and is the only product in this review that requires no installation, making it extremely portable. What surprised me about it was that, for such a small program, Wavosaur packs a lot of advanced features, including resample, bit-depth convert (8,16,24,32 bits), pitch shift, vocal removal, DC offset removing, auto-trim, silence remover, interpolate, auto detect region, cross-fade loop, and export of multiple .wav files from regions. It also supports ASIO drivers and VST plug-ins, has many analysis tools and is also skinable.
Thanks to subscribers, Jay Eitelman, Rinchen Tsepal, and Brandon Tanner for contributing to this review.
[1] http://audacity.sourceforge.net/[2] http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/
[3] http://www.wavosaur.com/
Free utility lets you easily edit MP3 files
mp3DirectCut [1] allows you to edit MP3 files directly without having to go back to the original. It's ideal for removing commercials, getting rid of plops and other wanted noises, cutting and pasting different MP3 tracks, or simply building your own ring tones from MP3 snippets.
This specialist utility is remarkably powerful, particularly given its tiny size: a mere 169KB. Apart from its powerful editing functions, it supports ID3v1.1, layer 2 (DVD audio) and cue sheets. It has automatic pause detection, allows fade-in and out, volume normalization and more. It allows direct MP3 creation from multiple sources, provided you have an MP3 codec (such as the wonderful LAME encoder [2]) in the same folder as mp3DirectCut.
It's really easy to use; quite intuitive really. And did I tell you that it's portable and totally free. mp3DirectCut is an absolutely outstanding product and the developer, Martin Pesch, should be congratulated. Freeware, All Windows versions, 169KB
[1] http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html
[2] http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php
The best free audio editing utility
Subscriber Brandon Tanner writes: "Gizmo, I know you recommend Audacity [1] for audio editing. It's a great product but you should check out Kristal; I think it might have Audacity's number! To start with, Kristal has an ASIO driver while Audacity doesn't. That means that you can monitor your pre-recorded tracks in real-time while you're overdubbing new ones, mandatory when multi-track recording. You can't do that in Audacity as the latency is too high. Second, Kristal supports VST plug-ins. There are tons of quality VST effects and instruments floating around the net, a lot of them free. Audacity's effects are.... err ummm... not quite up to par with some of the better VST ones. Not to bash Audacity but I have to give credit where credit's due. Third, Kristal has a 'proper' multi-track mixer, with a lot more options for routing individual tracks, effects, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like Audacity and I think it's a good program as long as your needs are basic. But Kristal definitely has more 'pro' features." Great suggestion, Brandon. Kristal is based on a 32-bit floating point audio engine that can handle sample rates of 44 to 192 kHz with word sizes of 16, 24 or 32 bit. It comes with a three band parametric EQ and supports WAVE, AIFF, FLAC, OGG Vorbis file formats. It can only handle a maximum of 16 audio tracks, though the web site mentions an upcoming version 2 that will handle more tracks as well as support for MIDI, virtual instruments, and a wider range of VST plugins. Like all media editing programs, Kristal requires a modern fast PC. Don't even think about using it with a sub 1Ghz machine. Free for personal use, Win 98/ME with IE6, Win2K, XP, 3.51MB.
[1] http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/
How to decrypt protected iTunes songs
Recently subscriber Travis Carden wrote, "Hey Gizmo, I thought I'd turn you on to a free tool called JHymn [1] for decrypting iTunes protected AAC files for use with alternate media players or portable MP3 devices ... you should check it out."
Well, I did check it out and it certainly offers a very effective freeware solution. Here's what the site says: "You buy some new music through iTunes, you run JHymn, hopefully do no more than click one or two buttons and when you quit JHymn and go back to iTunes, all of your DRM-protected music has been seamlessly replaced by unlocked, DRM-free music with the same sound quality as your original purchases, music which is virtually indistinguishable from music that you rip from your own CDs. If you had set up playlists which had included protected songs, the unprotected versions of those songs would now be in those same playlists, in the same play order."
I tried it and it works, though not quite as simply as the above description would have you believe. To start with, it doesn't work with iTunes V6 so I had to uninstall V6 and install V5 following the instructions on the JHymn site [2]. That accomplished, using JHymn to decrypt protected AAC files proved to be reasonably straight-forward.
Once my test files were decrypted I immediately re-installed iTunes V6 because I like the podcast features only available in V6. If you have a second PC you could leave a copy of V5 running on that machine and save yourself a bit of hassle.
The decrypted files are standard unprotected AAC files of the same quality as the DRM protected originals. They can be played on your iPod, iTunes or any device that supports AAC format. They can also be ripped to MP3 though there will be a small audio quality loss in the conversion.
There are clearly legal and moral concerns here. I suspect many folks would argue that if they pay for a song, it's "fair use" that they should be able to listen to it on whatever device they choose. It's something you as an individual have to think about, though, and there's plenty of material on the JHymn site to help you make up your mind.
Whatever, I suspect JHymn is the answer to the prayers of many iTunes users.
Free, open source software, Windows and Mac OS X (tested with Windows XP though it may be compatible with earlier versions), 588KB
[1] http://hymn-project.org/.
[2] http://hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1314
How to download music files in lossless format
Sick of paying for your music downloads in compressed, low quality formats? For a slight premium you can download them in Windows Lossless Format that will give you genuine CD quality when replaying. The cost from this site is around $1.29 a track. Note, too, that the download file size will be considerably larger than an equivalent MP3 file.
http://www.musicgiants.com/
How to work with audio CD .CDA files
If you view the contents of an audio CD from Windows, you'll see that it contains a number of .CDA files each corresponding to a song track. (CDA BTW, stands for Compact Disk Audio)
I regularly get letters from subscribers asking why they can't copy these files to their PC rather than first having to rip them to .WAV files.
It's a good question with a simple answer: there are no .CDA files on a CD. In fact, from a Windows perspective, there are no "files" at all.
An audio CD differs greatly from your hard drive or floppy disk drive in the way information is stored.
These devices store data in concentric rings called tracks. In contrast, audio CDs store data in a continuous spiral starting from the inside of the CD and ending at the outer edge of the CD. Kind of like a vinyl LP in reverse.
The format of the data stored on CDs is also quite different; it's a raw 16 bit digital PCM stream rather than a format that can be recognized by a Windows PC.
So what are .CDA files that you see on an audio CD?
These files are created by the Windows CD driver. They are simply representations of the CD audio tracks and are not actually on the CD.
Each .CDA file is a kind of a pointer to the location of a specific track on the CD and contains no musical information. They are all 44 bytes in length and each contain track times plus a special Windows shortcut that allows users to access the specific audio tracks.
So if .CDA files contain no musical information, what happens if you "copy" a .CDA from an audio CD to your hard drive and then double click it?
If the CD is still in the drive then the corresponding track will play from the CD. If you remove the CD you will get an error message. That's because the .CDA file contain no music, it only point to where the music is located on the CD.
To work with audio files on your CD you need first to convert them to .WAV, .MP3 or another file format that computers understand. That's what a CD ripper does and that's why you must use a ripper before you can work with your audio files. Simple as that.
Backing up DRM protected audio while retaining quality
This is an update to an item I mentioned in issue 127. In that issue I mentioned HotRecorder for Media [1] a $19.95 shareware utility that claims to be able to convert iTunes and Yahoo! Music sound files into .wav or .mp3 files while "maintaining the original quality of the audio files." I expressed skepticism about the quality claim but at the same time praised the program for its ease of use. The quality question generated a lot of correspondence from readers, several of whom claimed that they had used HotRecorder and other similar products such as Tunebite [2] and TotalRecorder [3] with excellent results. After doing some research it appears that these products differ from older recording products like MyMP3Recoder [4] in that they employ a virtual sound card to capture music being played rather than simply grab and re-digitize the analog output from a real sound card. In principal this means that sound quality may indeed be maintained as the whole process takes place in the digital domain. I confirmed this claim with the developer of Tunebite who stated, "One of the advantages of Tunebite is indeed that the virtual sound card works full digitally. So with the re-recording of DRM protected music the user has no reduction in quality." Sounds good to me ;>)
[1] http://www.hotrecorder.com/products/product_hotrecorder4media.asp
[2] http://www.tunebite.com
[3] http://www.highcriteria.com/
[4] http://www.mp3mymp3.com/mp3_my_mp3_recorder.html