Audacity 4 is Out ... Sort of: Hands-On with Cloud, Spectral Editing, and More

How much money are you paying for your recording software? I have thought about this a lot because I am paying nothing. Well, for one of them. For one of them, about 30 bucks a month.

But imagine if that was your only option. I've been doing this for 20-something years, $360 a year. You know, it starts to add up, about $6,000 or $7,000. So that's a lot of money saved.

If you can switch to free, you might be able to do that right now because Audacity 4 is out. we are talking about it. This is Big Podcast Playbook. This is a podcast to help you build your audience, grow your podcast, make a podcast that counts, make more money with your podcast.

And yes, Audacity 4, it is out, sort of. The Beta 2 version is out. I am recording on it right now. If I sound a little bit different, it is not just Audacity that is making me do that.

It is because I'm going straight into an SM57 mic by Shure. About $100, $109 right now. That and the SM58, a good standard entry-level mic. Into a Vocaster 1.

I do have a Cloudlifter on it, so that's optional, $100 something for that. But a $59, $69 interface, that's the Vocaster 1. Into Audacity 4 after that, so a bare-bones podcasting setup. I wanted to play around and see what this was like.

If you're curious, there are some major differences between Audacity 4 and Audacity, the previous version, 3.7.8. Interface looks different.

This one looks more like Pro Tools than actual Audacity. You can switch over to the old kind of boring colors, but this is very colorful. I'm recording on an orange track now. If I were to go to a second, third fourth track it going to be green red blue yellow I mean it a very colorful interface is not bad The standard Audacity effects that you been using they are still there One of the great things about the last couple of versions of Audacity is that you can use VST effects if you don't know what those are.

Basically, plugins that are gonna work with Adobe Audition. They're gonna work with Pro Tools. They're also gonna work with Audacity, so that's nice. Some of the changes you're gonna see here, they've got envelope editing, which if you don't know what this stuff is that I'm gonna go through, disregard it.

Not necessarily important for a one-man, two-man podcast. You can label tracks, which is nice if you want to mark sections, chapter points, kind of keep an idea of what it is that you're editing so you know where things are. For example, let's say you had a guest who said something great at the beginning of your podcast episode. You actually dived into the topic a little bit deeper later in your podcast episode.

Move this to the back. Here's what the topic is. It's going to help your editing out a little bit. Spectral editing.

Not really needed, in my opinion, for just a standard spoken word podcast. But it can be nice. For example, you might be able to hear the background noise behind me now. I'm doing this in my office.

It is not a soundproof room. And if a fire engine were to come by, which sometimes happens, I'm near a fire hall, I can edit that out with very little effect on my voice. Spectral editing is just a fancy way to do editing. If you don't know about it, don't worry about it.

But it's an option to you. It has cloud projects, which is nice. so if you're recording something, you've got an editor somewhere else that's doing the editing, pop this thing up into the cloud. You can work on one part of it.

Your editor's working on one part of it at the same time. It's gonna be like a Google Docs kind of thing. It is backwards compatible so your Audacity 3 projects, they will open up in Audacity 4. Again this is the beta version beta 2 and the full release version It is coming soon but until that happens I would not suggest doing anything that you going to release anything that really important in audacity for unless you're a risk taker it's probably pretty safe but you can only record something once you can rerecord but a totally different moment this is one of the reasons I suggest backing up everything that you record if you're curious how I do that in my studio a zoom f3 it's a The field recorder, super simple.

One touch recording, set it and forget it. Levels are automatically adjusted. It is a nice way to back up. There's a metadata editor.

I've talked about the effects. I've talked about the plugins. One of the things that's changed, some of the keystrokes have changed. I mean, not really.

You can go in and change them back to where they were. For example, I had a zoom in on Apple. I'm going to call it the Apple key. It's not control.

Is it called function? function one that was a way to zoom in on something they had function and then plus and then to zoom out I had function then three and they used function then minus so that kind of makes more sense but I've got some old school keystrokes that I've been using for years and years and years I've been using audacity as I mentioned for 20 something years I'm not changing now I do that one particular with my left hand I need my right hand for the trackball you can set it to do something custom like that if you want but if you don't do anything you've got some old keystrokes in there that you used on the 3.

7 version or anything before that that may have changed just change it it's not bad is it a little rough around the edges yeah maybe maybe it a newer interface does it look cool yeah it looks cool are people going to make fun of you as much for using audacity yeah probably not it has some cool things you can do For example when you delete a track or part of a track let say I messed something up I said, uh, uh, er, er, er, I want to take that out. When you take it out, it can leave that er, er, er, er, empty space and it'll just be blank.

And you can mess around with the timing all you want. Or what it can do is it can smash that together. That's nice. You've got options and flexibility, the granular things like that.

The main reason I'm releasing this episode, one, lets you know that Audacity 4 beta is out. And you can get this by going to audacityteam.org slash next. It is Audacity 4 beta version 2.

And I also wanted to play with it myself. So if you are hearing this, I have successfully recorded and edited an episode of Big Podcast Playbook completely in Audacity. One computer, one program. that is it hope you're having a great day if you have any questions you know you can always reach out bigpodcast.

com that's a way to do it if you want to subscribe to this podcast to make sure you never miss an episode back to the normal episodes after this one the ones that sound maybe a little bit better ones that have a little bit more compression on it eq the voice you're used to hearing you can do this by going to bigpodcast.com slash subscribe i've got three buttons for you one for apple one for android and the third one is an old-fashioned rss feed You will find it at bigpodcast.com slash subscribe.

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