Journal: News & Comment

Working with waveforms: a nice audio editor for Mac�OS�X

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Since my new and otherwise quite good MP3 player (annoyingly) puts gaps between tracks as it plays, it doesn't work well for albums with songs that blend into one another. One way to get around the problem is to merge several MP3 files into one, something I've been doing a bit over the past few days using audio editing software.

I originally planned to use my old standby, Pro Tools Free from Digidesign, but that program only runs under Mac OS 9, which is a pain to boot up when I usually run Mac OS X all the time. Happily, I discovered that the open-source Audacity editor (available for Mac, Windows, and Linux) has made remarkable progress in its latest beta versions.

Audacity even does something that the full, pricey Pro Tools does not (as far as I know): it will open MP3 files directly, let you edit the waveforms, and then export to MP3 again (with a suitable export library) without making you generate your own uncompressed AIFF files in between. You can do the same with the Ogg Vorbis format—which I like on principle, but which neither my Lyra player nor iTunes can read natively.

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