I’ve been putting together a podcast for running, using Audacity to record myself and mix in some tracks from my wife’s “Energy” playlist. Unfortunately, this has not been the smoothest possible experience. There’s no line in the time ruler to show where the mouse is in the track, nor in any other track. So trying to edit in one track based on the events in another becomes pure guesswork.
For its second trick, the UI for the “Auto Duck” effect suggests that it’s exactly what I want to fade the volume of a track down for a bit (to quiet the music while I’m talking), but the effect does not seem to change the track at all. [Actually, I read the manual, and Auto Duck uses the level of the track below the selected track to do its ducking. It has nothing to do with the current selection, as I had been expecting it to work.] So I’m stuck using the envelope tool instead to perform the effect by hand.
Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s rather light on feedback. Just like there’s no vertical lines for timing, there’s no indication of what volume level you’re moving the envelope to, nor (as far as I can see) a way to set the handle to a specific value. Either by using a reference handle, or by entering a specific dB value.
So it’s all guesswork and trial-and-error, instead of having software that helps you do what needs to be done. Professional audio on Linux has a lot more problems than what sound server a distro chooses. Not that I’ve ever seen Sound Forge in action, but hey. What good is an informed rant on the Internet?
(OK, my transcoding of m4a files should be done now—the m4a’s were crashing Audacity on import…)
[And as far as Auto Duck goes, it might be nice to just have a Duck effect that ducks the current selection. It could also be convenient to have Auto Duck work more like an adjustment layer in Photoshop, so that the audio below could be repositioned in time and the ducked section would move to follow, instead of the ducking being permanently recorded into the waveform of the upper track. But that's probably a ton of work to develop.]
