Steve Hastings, a DTS Inc software engineer, spoke about Audacity at the May 19, 2011 PNW meeting.
The PNW Section May meeting brought Steve Hastings, a software developer and engineer at the DTS Inc. Kirkland WA office, to speak about the free, open source audio editing program Audacity. The meeting was held with the cooperation of the Art Institute of Seattle's AES Student Section at their downtown Seattle campus. About 26 attended (1/2 AES members).
Steve spoke as an enthusiastic user and booster of the program, which is completely free and open source, and available for the main operating systems like Windows, Mac OSX, and GNU/Linux. Despite the price, it still performs most of the expected audio editing functions and a few novel ones, yet programmers can add or alter as they wish. It may not have some functions users may need from commercial applications, but can be useful and cost effective.
Mr. Hastings provided the road map for anyone interested, including how to download and install the software, and did several examples of typical editing functions such as analyzing a signal and performing edits and processing.
Steve also spoke about free software development and licensing/copyright issues, and discussed many questions and answers about audio editors in general as well as Audacity's feature set.
