Saturday, February 2, 2008

Convert those old LPs to MP3


If you’ve visited this site before, you’ll know I’m a big fan of free, open source software. Free software doesn’t just mean free of cost (like the “free beer” available when I go to visit my kids). It’s free. Use it, copy it and pass it around to your friends with few if any restrictions. And, you can do it legally.

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds including MP3 files. Open source simply means that if you have computer programmaning skills, you can get the source code, study it and modify it to your liking. Audacity is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux as well as other operating systems.

Just what can you do with Audacity?

Well you can record live audio from web casts and your favourite internet radio stations. If you can play it through your computer sound card, you can record it with audacity. Or, you can convert those old albums and tapes to MP3s (or OGG files). And once you’ve recorded the music, you can edit the sound to your liking. With a little bit of tinkering, I’ve even been able to re-channel my old mono albums to simulate stereo.

You can cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together or change the speed or pitch of a recording. There’s an undo feature that allows you to undo any mistakes you might make. And go back an unlimited number of steps to make corrections.

The application interface is intuitive, and for the easy stuff, most people would be able to use it straight out of the box. If it came in a box. For some of the more advanced features there’s a slight learning curve, but there is excellent documentation available.

Audacity is being developed by a group of volunteers and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

You can read all about the many features provided by the application and download a copy by simply clicking the link below.

Download Audacity