Digital Audio Editors

Recording and editing software for Linux. There seems to be two camps for audio editing:

1. Digital audio (like music on CDs)
2. MIDI audio (like music made on an elecronic keyboard synthesizer)

My focus is on the former, since I am interested in taking recorded material (such as speeches) and editing them.

Ardour looks amazing, but coming from experience with Audacity it's usage was not immediately obvious to me how to do the simple editing tasks that I most often need. Ardour is called a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), which apparently is something other than an audio editor according to some comments I've read (it seems all the same to me, just different levels of capability).

he GUI is easy to read and I intend to spend some time learning it when I have some time to spare.

Final verdict: Looks promising, but will take some serious time to learn. I'm not listing any pros and cons yet because I really have very little idea of how to use it yet.

Pros:

• Usage for basic features is fairly intuitive.

Cons:

• Audacity has hidden reporting telemetry (think: analytics). I have used Audacity for over 20 years, but this made me stop using it.

Also see The Register for several articles about the controversies since the Muse aquisition.

Final verdict: Goodbye, old friend.

A note in AUR posted on 12-Feb-2023 says:

Audacium has officially merged with Tenacity! Please use the latter instead of Audacium from now on.

Audacium is still available in AUR, but will not build on Endeavour. The error, for any interested, was this:

-- Conan: Adding audacity remote repository (https://artifactory.audacityteam.org/artifactory/api/conan/conan-local) verify ssl (True)
usage: conan remote [-h] [-v [V]] [-cc CORE_CONF] {add} ...
conan remote: error: unrecognized arguments: True
ERROR: Exiting with code: 2
CMake Error at cmake-proxies/cmake-modules/conan.cmake:853 (message):
  Conan remote failed='2'
Call Stack (most recent call first):
  cmake-proxies/cmake-modules/AudacityDependencies.cmake:4 (conan_add_remote)
  CMakeLists.txt:152 (include)

Tenacity is a fork of Audacity that came about because of the telemetry being added by Muse Group. The project has some of the original Audacity team members on it. It removes the telemetry and has some added features, but in Endeavour Linux it has not proven to be as stable as its parent. I have found it to work much more slowly and to crash fairly often, which reminds me of years gone by when Audacity would often crash.

As of this writing, in spite of the crashes, this is the audio editor I am using, largely due to familiarity with the interface. I tried installing the tenacity-git version, building from source, but ended up with a package that had no effects (no amplification, no fade, etc.). Building straight from the tenacity sources (rather than AUR), i.e.:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity
cd tenacity
cmake -G Ninja -S . -B build
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --install build

The description of this product seems interesting, but on my 32-inch 2560×1440 monitor the user interface was so tiny that I had trouble reading the controls. I can't imagine using it on a smaller monitor. I'm not going to change screen resolution every time I want to run a certain piece of software, so this one is on-hold for now.

Final verdit: Nope. Too hard to read.

Ocenaudio is distributed in binary format on Arch AUR, rather than source, which is unusual and makes me wonder. The web site says, The development of ocenaudio began when a brazilian research group at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (LINSE) needed an easy-to-use audio editor loaded with features such as multiple file formats support, spectral analysis and audio signal generation. ocenaudio development focuses primarily on usability, providing the user with a cohesive and intuitive audio editing and analysis tool.

There is no licence indicated on the web site nor in the software itself, which is strange to say the least. AUR shows the licence type as custom. The web site seeks donations, so it does appear to be at least free, if not open source.

Pros:

• Installed quickly with no extra dependencies needed on my system.
• Clean uncluttered interface. A relief after seeing so many tools with myriad buttons and icons.
• Light and dark themes. Light is the default, which is much easier to use during day-time hours.
• Intuitive operation. I opened an OGG file, highlighted a section, clicked Play and it worked as expected. Did ^C (copy), ^N (new), and ^V (paste) — it worked flawlessly and quickly. I was even able to do ^C while it was playing whereas in Audacity/Tenacity most functions are disabled while playback is happening.
• Mouse wheel adjusts the zoom while cursor is over the wave-form.
• Preferences are sensibly laid out and clearly described.
• Open files are arranged in a left panel, rather than each one opening in its own screen like Audacity. When working with multiple files this is very convenient.
• While playback is happening, clicking on a spot will instantly move the playback to that position. Depending on your work habits this could be a negative.
• Compressor can be previewed live — start the playback and as you alter the controls you will instantly hear the results. You can even display the wave-form inside the compressor window. That's so superior to Audacity's method of only previewing a few seconds and having to process the file in full before you can evaluate a longer portion.

Cons:

• Binary distribution, so you have to trust that when you turn off the reporting options it will actually stop reporting.
• Ideally suited to mono or stereo editing only. It supports up to 16 channels, but setting panning is clumsy and I don't see any obvious way to align tracks, nor any way to import a different sound file into a new track to mix with the rest. For track editing features Audacity/Tenacity is much more flexible.
• If you change a keyboard shortcut to use a predefined one, they are both disabled. I mapped Audacity's zoom keys (^1, ^3, ^E, ^F) and it showed the programme's defaults greyed-out but did not ask me to do anything. I tried to use the shortcuts but they did not work until I disabled the default ones. Not too hard to figure out, but a bit less intuitive than other features.
• There is no “zoom normal” function.
• Even with the default preference set that the view should follow the playback head position, if you rewind to the start and press Play it does not scroll to follow the playback position. Once you scroll there yourself, then the view follows the playback, but I don't see any simple and quick way to centre the view on the playback position.
• There is a button to jump to the start, but not one to jump to the end. The fast-forward and reverse buttons are fairly useless as they only move the playback position by a tiny amount. I can't see how that's any improvement over positioning the cursor with the mouse. I would personally get rid of the forward and reverse arrows and replace them with one that jumps to the end of the recording and another that centres the view on the playback position.

Final verdict: For routine editing of speech and stereo audio recordings, this looks like the one to replace Audacity for 95% of what I do.

This is not a free product. It costs $60 for an individual licence or $225 for a commercial one (as of August 2024, see here). It pops up a nag screen to remind you of this on launch.

Pros:

• Layout has some appeal, looks well organised unlike LMMS which looks rather messy on first launch.

Cons:

• Menu starts up being really small on a 32-inch screen, much like LMMS.
• Disk navigation also has small font and does not show bookmarks. Sometimes a directory opens in an unexpected place, e.g., I found myself once near the bottom rather than at the top when I entered a directory.
• I opened a FLAC file and the display area was very small, only using about 8% of the width of the wave-form area, and rather than showing a wave-form it said “OFFLINE” twice in all-caps.
• Pressing the + button or using Zoom In from the View menu only expands the used area to half of the available space (see screenshot). I couldn't see how to get it to use the entire width. Maybe there is a reason it leaves half the space (on the right) empty that is not obvious.
• Leaving the editor sit for a few minutes while I did something else led to the entire width being used to display the “OFFLINE” message. I have to zoom in or out to get the wave-form to display again. I noticed again when I went to a browser window for just a few seconds that it went back to showing OFFLINE. If just clicking on the window brought back the wave-form I might keep going, but having to zoom-in or zoom-out just to display the wave-form again is the last straw for me, especially given that I only have 60 days to make up my mind and don't want to feel locked in by saving projects in their proprietary format.

Final verdit: Not for me.

This editor seems to be entirely for MIDI samples, not for editing digital audio files. Its description is: MIDI/audio sequencer and notation editor.

Final verdit: Not for me.

An old editor that still works today, but the interface is very out-dated and the preferences are hard to understand. I managed to open a sound file, made the tool-bar visible, and started laying, but there was no cursor, which makes editing an exercise in futility. The operation was so quick that I spent 20 minutes trying to use it, to see if I could live with its shortcomings, but ultimately I had to give it up, the single biggest reason being the lack of a playback cursor.

Pros:

• Very small, runs really quickly and smoothly compared to most others.
• Very nice zoom slider, much nicer than Audacity's method of using Ctrl+1/2/3 to zoom in and out in measured amounts.
• Fairly intuitive (albeit quirky) operation once you enable the tool-bar.

Cons:

• Antiquated black-and-white interface with pixelated bitmap fonts. It's quite a trip down memory lane back to the 1990s days of audio editing software, at which time this was no doubt a very impressive piece of software. It is an impressive testimony to its design that it still works in a modern Linux desktop.
• No “open recent” and no bookmarks as you would see in a file manager like Thunar. It starts in your home directory.
• Save As starts in your home directory, rather than the directory from which you opened the file.
• No playback cursor. This is a huge handicap when you are trying to figure out the precise range that you want to edit, e.g., a specific portion of audio that you want to cut or copy.
• When you highlight an area of a wave-form and press Play it does not play the highlighted area, but starts at the beginning of the file. To play the highlighted area you have to right-click on it and choose Play from the pop-up menu.
• When you highlight an area you would expect that an edit function would operate on it, but e.g., if you choose Reverse it will reverse the entire wave-form, not just the highlighted section.
• When you click on a spot an arrow appears along the time-line, but playback does not start there, so I'm not sure what the arrow indicates.
• If you press Play multiple times, instead of starting over it starts another playback, so you end up with echoing/overlapping output of the audio. I'm not sure why anyone would intentionally want that. You have to press Stop and then Play to restart playback.
• By default there is no tool-bar (e.g., no play button, etc.), just the sound wave.
• Without the tool-bar starting playback is done by placing a check-mark in an option item on the bottom status bar. The check-box is set when playback is happening and clears when it is stopped. Rather bizarre, but once you realise what it does it is certainly simple. However, like the play button, playback always starts at the beginning of the entire file, which makes no sense to me.
• No pop-up tool tips when you hover over an icon, so you just have to click it and see what happens.
• Preferences are not very well worded. The Help button pops up a useless window that has one paragraph of information that tells you such useless information as that when you click Save your settings will be saved (duh). The mouse scroll wheel does not scroll the Preferences window, although it does scroll the Help windows. Some examples of poorly worded settings: “transform”, “number of vector elements to display”, and many others that are anyone's guess as to what they mean or do.
• Help texts in general are pretty bad. The fonts are pixelated
• When you open a sound file, even if you do not save anything, you will end up with a second file with the same name plus “.snd”.
• After installing I ended up with three menu items: snd, snd (ruby), and snd (s7). They all look and work the same as far as I can tell.