Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 7th Jun 2002 19:42 UTC
Audacity is a multitrack/recording free audio editor. It started a few years back as a simple sound editor, but since then it has evolved in a powerfull modern editor, by supporting multi-track recording. The stable 1.0 version was released only a few days ago.
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I agree that it would have maybe been better for Eugenia not to host this story at all. Unfortunately as published it gives a wrong impression of Audacity
(But she was right that it can run on any OS, if you help complete ports of portaudio and wxWindows you could run it on BeOS too)
Audacity isn't really a full multitrack or DAW or anything like that, not yet at least. Audacity 1.0 is basically a nice WAV editor, it can load/save/play/record 16-bit integer sample data and handles a mono or stereo record source using the non-RT OS native media APIs e.g. OSS on Linux
Yes, you can have more than one track, and it will automatically mix down during playback... but no, you can't do multitrack recording, so you can't usefully record a live performance unless it's a solo.
Audacity 1.1 is a more complete (but as yet not stable, unlike 1.0) piece of software, I've been noodling around with it because of the LADSPA support. Audacity 1.1 is pro-audio capable (it uses 0.24 IEEE floats @ 48kHz for anyone who understands what that is) but still doesn't do multitrack recording and is missing many expected features of a semi-pro PC audio tool.
For me Audacity promises to fill the gap in Free Software between toy "Sound recorder" apps that no-one should have to put up with (like MS Paint but for audio) and the powerful but hard to learn "audio is data" tools like pD.
Those people who have said elsewhere in this thead "it's not exactly Pro Tools" or similar things, should look at Ardour http://ardour.sourceforge.net/ instead of Audacity.