Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Handiham World for 11 March 2009

Welcome to Handiham World!

Free software tour: Discovering Audacity

Audacity screenshotIt has been a relentless winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, so I thought it would be nice if we all took a bit of a holiday. I can't afford a real holiday, but how about a tour? A virtual tour of some of the best free software I have discovered over the years might be just the thing to help us make the last dregs of winter go down a little easier!

Audacity: No, I am not talking about the kind of audacity than means being bold. This Audacity is a free, open-source audio recording program for your computer. It is cross-platform, which means that you can use Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems to run Audacity. The reason I want you to discover Audacity is that you will learn to use a powerful recording tool, your computer, and learn to work with new recording technology. If you have been frustrated as I have been over the years by broken cassette tapes, the impossible situation of finding a place in the middle of a cassette, editing tape audio, annoying tape hiss, and all the rest of the problems that go along with analog tape recorders, you know what I mean.

In this edition of your weekly Handiham World I am going to give you some basic tips about how to find Audacity on the Internet. Some of you will be brave enough to download and install Audacity and give it a try. Others may be interested in learning more about basics of audio recording using a computer. Either way, I would like you to take a look at the Audacity website and then let me know if you are interested in learning more about recording audio, audio editing, and converting one kind of audio to another. The reason I am asking this question is that I am contemplating doing a series of tutorials covering this topic. If there is enough interest out there, we will cover it in some depth.

Read more at handiham.org.