Hi, first of all, thanks for this amazing program. I’ve been using it for years and it’s great, really really helpful. Thanks developers and all the staff/people related with it.
Well, I use it for 2 things:
1. Music
When learning songs with guitar, I use a lot Audacity, cause it can reduce a lot the speed WITHOUT compromising the audio quality, change pitch, replay over and over again the same section, show the waves of the sound, invert effect… you know, really powerful tool.
I miss here some real-time effects, something like change the pitch on-the-go, without processing, and the same with speed. Anyway, as I have a powerful laptop, it takes just 3-5 seconds to change the pitch or the speed, so it’s OK.
2. Movies
a) I use also Audacity when I wanna sync a spanish audio film file to an english movie. I extract both spanish and english audios. I load them in Audacity. We’re talking about 2 hours length tracks, with 6 channels, 1.5GB. This step is really slow, DUE to the HDD. Very first reason to use a SSD.
b) Usually, spanish movies are 25fps, and american movies are 24fps, so the first thing I always have to do is reduce the speed of the spanish audio, so it’s longer and fits the english track. Change the tempo of this kind of files takes also some serious time. Second reason to use a SSD.
c) Then it comes the hard work, I have to compare both audios. As I usually have to add the spanish audio to the english movie, the spanish audio is the one that is gonna be edited, and the english is there for comparison. Now, I zoom in and compare both files, viewing 30 seconds in the screen, so I can work comfortably. Then delete audios of extra scenes, or add the english audio when english movie have extra scenes. When I zoom in/out and move between sections, it takes seconds to respond. Third reason to use a SSD.
d) Once the spanish audio is done and synced with the english track, I have to export it. This is CPU business. I have an Intel i7 4700MQ quad-core processor, with hyperthreading, so I have 8 threads running @2.4GHz, but as I have Turboboost 2.0, this can go up to 2.9-3.4GHz. When I export the project, there’s only one core in use, 2 threads show some movement, the other 6 threads are idle. So I’m not squeezing at all the power of my 4 cores. So, this exporting process takes a lot of time too. I don’t know if it’s planned to support multi-core exporting in Audacity, it would be really really helpful, cause that could reduce the exporting time almost 4 times.
Thanks!
Another Question: when I import a track to Audacity, where is it being loaded? I though RAM, but I think I’m wrong.