- Can Audacity be used as a professional DAW?
Let's find out.
(music whirring)
Well, first of all, Audacity is free,
so it's a great learning platform
if you're just getting into DAWs or D-A-Ws.
For those of you who are uninitiated
and wondering what Earth I'm talking about with DAWs,
no, I'm not talking
about the things you use to enter your house.
I'm talking about Digital Audio Workstation.
So yes, Audacity is a very competent
digital audio workstation.
Not only can you go ahead
and edit multiple pieces of music and dialogue
and put in sound effects and do all that cool stuff,
it works, it's free, and it's a great way to get started.
Point number two is that most pro plugin companies
have plugins that are compatible with Audacity.
This is great if you like Izotope, if you like Waves,
if you like any kind of plugin that you want to use
to manipulate the voice to make it sound better,
make your audio more stereo,
add a bit of reverb, add some echo, add some delay.
It's all possible inside Audacity by going into the VST
or AU, audio units of your Mac plugin section
in the menu and selecting your favorite plugin.
So yes, not only can you use the editor
as a professional DAW, but you can also use
some really top end high quality plugins to make your audio
sound even better.
And my third favorite thing about Audacity
is that you can use many of the effects
you'd find in much more expensive pieces of software,
albeit they're a little bit clunkier to use.
Like for instance, the EQ equivalent to Parametric EQ,
it's called Filter EQ in Audacity is usable
but you have to draw on points and it's a bit notchy
and strange and other editors like Logic
and Audition do it smoother
and you have to keep previewing each time you make a change
rather than in real time,
but that's okay because Audacity is free.
It's got compression, it's got noise gates,
all of this stuff is integrated as standard,
so certainly if you want to get started
and maybe get your feet wet with effects and editing,
Audacity seems like it's a pretty good way to go.
Now let's take a look at some negatives.
Number one, the preview of effects is slow.
As I alluded to in my third Pro point,
it's actually really easy to start using the effects
but it's not so easy to preview them.
One of my pet peeves about Audacity is you cannot preview
sound effects in real time.
So if you're doing some EQ of a voice or a piece of music,
or if you're editing something and you wanna make it
sound better with compression,
you will have to make the changes,
then hit the preview button and that can cost you
a little bit of time.
Multitrack editing is far more superior in other D-A-Ws,
like for instance, Adobe Audition.
I love editing in the multi-track over in Audition.
In Audacity, it is possible it's just a bit slower and well,
it's just not quite my experience
when I'm working fast with multiple editing clips,
I really want to go fast
and jiggle things and move things around
and add cross fades really, really quickly.
You can do it, it just takes you longer in Audacity
but as a free app, it's absolutely fine.
And finally, Spectral View is just not as intuitive
as it is in Adobe Audition.
In Audition, I can really fine tune
and select parts of the Spectral Frequency Display
and really dial in on certain frequencies
in the audio I'm editing.
In Audacity, it is there,
it's available for you as the spectrogram option
under each separate track, but it's far harder to use.
There's not as much detail,
so that could hold you back from doing advanced things
such as noise reduction and restoration.
Anyway, what do you think?
Let me know your pros and cons.
Are you using Audacity as a professional DAW,
are you a professional podcast editor?
Are you a music producer using Audacity?
And if so, what do you like about it?
What do you dislike?
Let me know in the comments down below,
and also make sure to go watch my voice editing tips video.
It's somewhere on the screen here.
I think you're really going to enjoy it
if you're just getting started with Audacity.