Audacity Forum

I'm a newbie to audio and video editing with a question on Audacity 1.3.8 (stable version) suitability for an application. I'm formatting and editing a music video for upload onto YouTube on a brandy new MacBook Pro with OS 10.6. I've converted to MPG4 for video and MP3 for audio which now reside in iMovie, and I want to cleanup and enhance the audio, and re-synch with the video, prior to upload. Is Audacity 1.3.8 a good solution for this application? Do I also have to download LAME for export back to MP3 format?

Audacity will be a good audio editor to use, but you should do your editing on uncompressed audio files (WAV or AIFF). Your video editor application should be able to work with uncompressed files and convert them to the necessary format.

Audacity 1.3.8 has now been replaced by 1.3.9. Upgrading is highly recommended as 1.3.9 fixes several bugs.

You already went too far. Once you export into MPEG4 and MP3, that's it. Those are delivery formats, not production formats because they damage the show. If you pulled the music tracks into Audacity and messed with it, the damage would go up as you create the new MP3 -- even if you did nothing to the show at all.

You need to do all the post production as close to the original shooting format as you can get.

Any reason you didn't use h.264 and Apple AAC? Those are close cousins to Flash that YouTube uses. MP3 format dates back to 1989 and you can do much better with more modern formats.

Oh, the original question. Audacity will not open newer more modern sound formats, so you would be converting your work to WAV, editing it and then exporting and converting back to your production format -- and then make your delivery format and hope to goodness the track matches the video through the whole show.

What are we going to do that you can't do in iMovie? If you project needing to mix multiple music beds and voice tracks into a stereo show, then yes, I think Audacity would be valuable as I don't think you can do multi-track in iMovie.

Koz