Audacity Forum

To anyone who could maybe help. Reading most of these posts it seems clear to me that I am kind of out of my league. I work with animals and am interested in measuring animal vocalizations - I am interested in finding differences in frequencies between animals and treatment groups in my research. Is Audacity useful for analyzing vocalizations? It seems to have a lot of features but I was curious to hear some comments about its capacities to scientifically analyze sound. If I am looking at the wrong kind of software is there anything you can think of that would work better?
Thank you for all of your help!

You can do some basic frequency analysis in Audacity using "Analyze menu > Plot Spectrum". This feature is much improved in the current 1.3 version of Audacity.
Audacity also has partial support for VAMP, plug-ins, though I have not used these. http://vamp-plugins.org/

For more advanced scientific analysis, have a look at:
WaveSurfer http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/
Praat http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
Vamp plugins http://vamp-plugins.org/

stevethefiddle wrote:You can do some basic frequency analysis in Audacity using "Analyze menu > Plot Spectrum".
This feature is much improved in the current 1.3 version of Audacity.

Bear in mind that the frequency analysis in Audacity 1.3.11 can only process about 4 minutes maximum.
So probably not a long enough to analyse monkey howling, rat squeaking, (as you'd want to look at hours/days worth of data).

Trebor wrote:Bear in mind that the frequency analysis in Audacity 1.3.11 can only process about 4 minutes maximum.

Yes, but the "Spectrum View" in the track drop down menu can show a continuous spectrum for the entire track.

Also, the sound activated recording could be useful.

Thanks everyone!!! I'm going to check those other sites and see what I can do. I will let you know what I decide to do....................More questions may follow.