Audio Programs...

I just wanted to do a quick post concerning audio programs. Specifically just one, but I'll mention a few others, as I'm sure there are tons of them out there. The program I wanted to mention for those ministries on a low budget or no budget at all is the sound program called Audacity. Audacity is a powerful little sound program that is free source. That's right, it's completely free. You can use it to record your sermons or special music. The reason I really like Audacity is one feature of which I use it for is taking out background noise.

Say you are recording from a cassette tape which you don't have a cd or mp3 for. Those old tapes get a static backgound noise. With Audacity use the "Noise Removal" select a section of the audio where just the noise is playing... then have Noise Removal remove that noise in the whole audio. It will take some playing with to get it to sound good, but it's awesome.

The next great thing besides being free is it's a cross platform application. Which means it works on both Mac and Windows machines.

The down side to audacity is you can export as an MP3, WAV, or Ogg Vorbis. When you attempt an MP3 it says "Audacity does not export MP3 files directly, but instead uses LAME". Something you need to get separately. I'm too lazy to look for that stuff. So I just export as a .WAV file then convert it to MP3 using iTunes. May lose some quality, but I don't notice.

However the program I use for recording the sermons at church is "Sound Studio" Sound studio does cost $124.94, but you can download a full demo for free. To my knowledge it does not have noise removal like Audacity. And Sound Studio is a Macintosh program only. I've found it works better for me while doing live recordings to my lap top via a "iMic" that plugs into any head phones jack. And it saves in any audio formatt, of which I use .AIFF. These files are huge, but when burnt on a CD will play on any CD player, unlike the MP3 that will only play on CD players that support MP3 formats. Which I would think most are today, but some of the elders won't know the difference and have older CD players.

Well sorry for the long post and that's all I have for now. I would mention "Garage Band" is used by most Mac people, but I didn't want to be too Mac biased in the post lol. Let us know if you use a different sound program.