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Topic: choosing a free audio editor (Read 7505 times) previous topic - next topic
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choosing a free audio editor

I'm looking for a free audio editor with an EQ that will let me change the sound of wav files and allow me to save those wav files
after I've changed the sound using the EQ.  I used one (audacity?? I can't remember) where it let me do so, but the EQ was a line
graph that I had manipulate by pulling the line up or down and I couldn't get a sound close to what I was trying for.  I'm looking for something that will
for example let me increase or decrease say, 300hz or any other frequency by a few decibels.  I guess something like a parametric EQ??

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #1 –
The Audacity beta has a graphic EQ with many bands.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #2 –
As far as I know every audio editor has an equalizer.  It's probably a matter of finding one that you like and one that's easy to use, and learning how to use it.  I suggest you try out some software to find a program that you like.  With a little practice and familiarity, it should get easy to use.  Of course, when you limit yourself to free software, your choices are limited.

Audacity is the most popular free audio editor, by far.  It's a full featured editor and it shoud be adequate for most hobbyists.

I don't have the latest version of Audacity installed, and I agree that the built-in EQ is not very "friendly" on the version I have.  However, there are lots of plug-ins available for Audacity and you might find one that works for you.

Wavosaur[/u] is another free audio editor.  It looks like there are a few equalizer plug-ins for it.

I mostly use GoldWave[/color], which is NOT free ($50 USD), but upgrades are free and I've been getting free upgrades for about 10 years, which makes it nearly free!    GoldWave has a limited (7 band) graphic equalizer, a parametric equalizer, and an FFT equalizer/filter that allows you to draw an EQ curve (similar to Audacity).  Like most audio editors, it also has high-pass & low pass filters, bandpass & bandstop filters.

I'd put GoldWave in the same category/class as Audacity...  It's a great hobbyist tool but most pros use higher-end software.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #4 –
Quote from: tropicalfish on
The Audacity beta has a graphic EQ with many bands.


Since Audacity exploits  VST plug-ins it provides easy access to an incredible collection of equalizers and other signal processors, and that's just the free stuff!

While my daily driver, Cool Edit Pro (CEP) has a very fine collection of built-in signal processors including a rich collection of different kinds of equalizers, I occasionally have to run Audacity to access VST plug-ins that provide signal processing options that CEP lacks.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #6 –
thanks everyone.  I've got some homework to do when I get home!  I'll let everyone know what worked best for me. btw, I know nothing about vts plug-ins other than you download it and put it in the software's "plug-ins" folder.  Are all vts plug-ins compatible with all sound editors? I found this web page and some of the eqs looked enticing.  I wanted to put some of them in audacity's plug in folder...wonder if they'll work??

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #7 –
Quote
Are all vts plug-ins compatible with all sound editors?
I think it's the most commmon plug-in standard, but I wouldn't say "all"...  I'd say you have to try a particular plug-in with a particular editor.  There are a few other plug-in standards too, and if you buy pro-quality plug-ins, they often come in more than one format.

If you have a high-end editor (or DAW) and you buy some pro VST plug-ins for a couple hundred dollars, I'd expect them to work together.    If you're using a free (or hobby) audio editor with free VST plug-ins...  "Your mileage may vary."  (GoldWave requires a plug-in that makes VST plug-ins work...  I think that's asking for trouble...  I don't use any 3rd-party plug-ins with GoldWave.)

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #8 –
Quote from: uglijimus on
Are all vts plug-ins compatible with all sound editors?


How compatible a given VST plugin is with a given editor is IME mostly up to the people who are supporting the editor. Case in point is Audacity, whose support for VST plugs which has been a work in progress. I can think of one plug I tried that looiked like $%$#@ when I brought it up. Not usuable. I upgraded to the most recent version of Audacity and it became at least useful. The author's creeen shots were different from what I got with Audacity, but it was usable.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #9 –
As a coder that has developed a VST host in my free time some years ago, I can assure that VST is not exactly a "plug and play" technology. (Originally there were some methods not well documented, and sometimes plugins where thought to be correct when they worked on Steinberg's Cubase).

Also, the newest version ( 3.x ) is completely different from the previous ones, and hosts need to be written from scratch (or almost) for this new version.

That said, there are plenty of VST plugins, both free and paid, which work in most of the available hosts.

Generally speaking, if the plugin doesn't try to do things too different than what most plugins do, then it has many chances to work everywhere.


But back to audacity.... Have you *really* tried audacity's 1.3 beta equalizer?  31 bands with a width of 1/3rd of octave is not enough for your? (remember to increase the filter length to max)

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #10 –
Quote from: [JAZ] on




But back to audacity.... Have you *really* tried audacity's 1.3 beta equalizer?  31 bands with a width of 1/3rd of octave is not enough for your? (remember to increase the filter length to max)


I had a problem download audacity's beta last night, but was successful downloading Krystal Audio.  So I've only just started to look at that.  I hope (depending on work) I'll have  a chance to pop a wav file in there today and mess around with it.  btw, a 31 band EQ should be more than enough!

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #11 –
Quote from: [JAZ] on

As a coder that has developed a VST host in my free time some years ago, I can assure that VST is not exactly a "plug and play" technology. (Originally there were some methods not well documented, and sometimes plugins where thought to be correct when they worked on Steinberg's Cubase).

Also, the newest version ( 3.x ) is completely different from the previous ones, and hosts need to be written from scratch (or almost) for this new version.

That said, there are plenty of VST plugins, both free and paid, which work in most of the available hosts.

Generally speaking, if the plugin doesn't try to do things too different than what most plugins do, then it has many chances to work everywhere.


But back to audacity.... Have you *really* tried audacity's 1.3 beta equalizer?  31 bands with a width of 1/3rd of octave is not enough for your? (remember to increase the filter length to max)


It isn't a 4 band full parametric eq, but there are several free plugins that give you 4 bands or more.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Billytheonion on
Maybe oen of these can fit the bill ?

http://www.free-sound-editor.com/
http://www.music-editor.net/
http://www.wavosaur.com/
http://www.cycleof5th.com/products/soundengine/?lang=en

First, I'll say: I have tried none of these. But I was looking for a nice alternative to Adobe's Audition recently and didn't find Audacity very appealing. It was crashy and very picky about everything.

That said, Wavosaur seems very promising. It has VST support and is small - Hopefully light as well.

I'm quite worried why "Power Sound Editor Free" and "Music Editor Free" looks 95% alike and doesn't even appear to come from the same company... Maybe someone can shed some light on this? The editor seem appealing - It has a CEP'ish look in an Office-like framework. Unfortunately it doesn't say anything about VST plugins, which is a shame.
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #13 –
Probably mostly OT:

I love Audacity as much as the next guy but there are some truly atrocious problems with it.

Nyquist's internal data representation is float and not double. This is a huge, huge deal-breaker for me, in terms of actually desiring to eg write IIR filters in Nyquist that I would trust would not break, without spending a huge amount of time testing/analyzing for quantization error behavior. (One thing I learned when writing foo_view is that it is remarkably easy to get biquad filter sections to oscillate in single precision. Only a few sections in parallel form is all you need.)

If you have dither enabled under the Quality settings, Audacity cannot edit 16-bit audio data nondestructively. Yes - it is braindead enough to apply the dither to a 16-bit file, even if you performed non-value-modifying changes to 16-bit data (read: cuts and pastes, no DSP). This means you need to turn off dither entirely to do any sort of trimming or track layout on 16-bit audio, which then bites you in the ass every time you actually apply DSP..... (btw I did in fact report this to their support email, no response)

Earlier versions used to allow setting of non-integral sample rates, which came in a huge deal of handy when time-aligning vinyl samples. No more.

There are major, major issues with 24-bit recording in some configurations. Particularly, it doesn't exist in MME - if you ask it to record in MME in 24 bits, even though the API supports it, Audacity will silently hand you 16-bit data instead. IIRC, after looking at the source code, I figured out that this was more of a PortAudio bug than an Audacity bug, but it still sucks donkey balls. IIRC I saw the same thing in ASIO too in Audacity, but that might be driver-related - at one point I think I saw it in Samplitude too (!). REAPER is one of the few apps which consistently records 24-bit clean.

That of course brings up the other point that you need to build Audacity yourself to get ASIO, for particularly dull LGPL-related reasons, and it is a shockingly obtuse process. Most notably no feedback is given in the build, for if you've configured ASIO correctly. Unless you hack the source yourself you'll just have to open up audacity.exe and wonder "where's my ASIO?"

Audacity gives you the choice of either a somewhat slow and tremendously sh*tty resampler, or a not-half-bad resampler which is orders of magnitude slower than anything in foobar.

If you've enabled destructive editing, hitting "Stop" in the middle of some DSP operations results in tracks being only partially overwritten with the DSP output. No warning signs when this happens, and IIRC it doesn't happen every time - you've gotta look/listen to the waveforms to see what's going on. I do not get this, because if I have plenty of Undo levels, and a copy of the data is being made anyway in audacity's temp folder, there's really no excuse for inplace editing to corrupt the data in so ludicrous a manner.

No internal, generic IIR facility. Probably related to Nyquist's single precision nature I mentioned above.

No digital peak/rms meter.

Internal MP3 export interface is CBR-only IIRC, and I had a surprisingly hard time getting VBR working with the custom export modes.

When using the track UI controls: Sample rate changes are instantaneous (no computation required) and are lazily evaluated at playback/DSP execution. Data format changes convert the format RIGHT THEN (not lazy) and take quite a while.

Spectrum plot is quite limited in a lot of ways.

FIR filter dialog has a fairly poor interface that has also been really bugged as of recent SVN. At least once I've had to hand-edit the saved filter files to do what I want.

-----

Unfortunately, all that said, it's still the best free audio editor.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #14 –
I tried the Krystal Audio software. I thought that a parametric EQ would be best, I couldn't seem to correct the offensive frequency on the album I was experimenting with.  So I went with the beta Audacity and the 31-band EQ worked wonders.  I've been experimenting with Malevolent Creation's "Doomsday X" album.  When listening with my Denon 2000 headphones, it is very apparent that not all tracks were recorded at the same time (I believe they were recorded on two separate occasions)  and about half of them contain an extremely offensive snare drum that is overly bloated with midbass.  I successfully isolated that snare drum by manipulating the 200hz frequency by reducing the dB by around 7 or so.  The result, while not exactly matching the rest of the album, is still very close and I was very impressed that it still sounded relatively natural.  Thanks for everyone's recommendations.

I'm so impressed that I may have to look into some other albums and do the same.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #15 –
Quote from: Axon on
Probably mostly OT:

I love Audacity as much as the next guy but there are some truly atrocious problems with it.

(snip)
-----

Unfortunately, all that said, it's still the best free audio editor.

Thanks for the detailed critique.  What do you use for a non-free editor?  I currently use Adobe Audition 1.5.  It's great but 6 years old and not optimal for FLAC, Windows 7, etc.

I recently tried Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio and rejected it for various reasons.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #16 –
I load flac into Audition all the time, but I save as wave and convert back to flac and tag with other tools.  I can easily save to flac with Audition, but I'm not sure what version my plug-in uses.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #17 –
I am without my PC, buy I think Audacity is the best free audio editor.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #18 –
Quote from: greynol on
I load flac into Audition all the time, but I save as wave and convert back to flac and tag with other tools.  I can easily save to flac with Audition, but I'm not sure what version my plug-in uses.

I generally do the same thing.  AA 1.5 doesn't like saving as FLAC due to the 4 character extension.  I use the VUPlayer plugin which uses FLAC 1.2.1.

choosing a free audio editor

Reply #19 –
Quote from: gottogo99 on
Thanks for the detailed critique.  What do you use for a non-free editor?

My audio interests are more hobbyist and theoretical than professional/paying - so far I haven't had the need for a non-free editor, honestly.

I use the old free version of KRISTAL for ASIO recording, some sox for batch work, LabVIEW for wilder exploits (nothing you probably couldn't do in Octave though) and Audacity as a catch all for anything else including general waveform display and track cutting.