Audacity Free Digital Audio Workstation

Software of the week, March 6, 2007

The power of music and audio recoding and mixing can bring a lot to lower and upper grade students alike. We have used tape recorders for years you record and playback lessons and for recording Readers Theater. In teaching music creation students can learn about fractions, rhythm, and patterns. Admittedly a tape recorder provides an easy to use tool any teacher can use. Now we have tremendous recording power through our computers, that can out perform any tape recorder available, and truly expands our students ability to create. Setting up a Digital Audio Workstation can be done for a very low cost now days. In fact, if your PC has a built in mike you can download a reasonably powerful and easy to use program for free. Audacity is an open source program that really built very well.

I was able to start recording immediately after installing by simply pressing the on screen record button. This actually surprised me because some of my professional audio applications require a little more setup than this to function. The recording quality was really good. I also learned to do basic cuts and edits without any trouble. The use of the program was very intuitive, and I have not yet needed to go to support documents to perform a variety of tasks. This program is not much more difficult than your tape recorder to operate, but is far more powerful. It is easy to apply effects, clean up noise and cut to create the perfect audio recordings.

Audacity gets an A because of the great features, easy to use interface, and the great price. This is a free application that really is worth much more.