On Fri, Jan 01, 2010 at 03:06:15PM -0500, Tom Metro wrote: > I tried Audacity, as that's what I hear mentioned most often, and I found: I'm no expert, but I do sometimes make home movies, and I've used audacity whenever I've needed to do any audio processing. > -It locked up X twice. (Once with 1.3.7, as packaged for Ubuntu 9.04, > and again with 1.3.10, that I backported from 9.10.) I've never seen it do that, though I don't use Ubuntu except at work, where I'm unlikely to be doing any audio work. Might be a Ubuntu bug (and possibly not specific to audacity)? > -The normalizer doesn't normalize that much. It's supposed to eliminate > DC offsets, if that option is checked, but it doesn't work unless only a > small sample of audio is selected. (I'm guessing it averages the entire > selection to find the center point, so if the DC offset wavers over the > selected area, it does nothing.) I'm not sure, but I'm under the impression that a DC offset is expected to be a constant voltage. If that's so, and in your signal it's not constant, I could see how that could throw off normalization algorithms... > -The compressor doesn't compress. The expectation is that dynamic range > compression should take any audio below a threshold and amplify it, > while leaving peaks above that threshold as-is. That sounds like the opposite of what I expect compression to do: reduce the peaks, and (possibly) amplify the signal to the extent that produces no (additional) distortion. > I'm hoping there is something better available. I expect that there is, but my guess is you may have to pay for it. It's been a while since I researched OSS audio programs, but audacity has always been the recommendation whenever I did. I know nothing about commercial programs, as audacity has always fulfilled my relatively limited needs. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.