Attack of the Pod Penguins 2: Introducing Audacity

The first fundamental tool for a podcaster is a good audio editor. Get started with Audacity, from importing a file into a project to making some simple edits.

By Tony Steidler-Dennison, LinuxWorld.com, 08/28/06

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I have a good friend who's a carpenter and building contractor. A few years ago, in an effort to save costs, his small company and mine shared office space. One day, he was looking over my shoulder as I cleaned up a few lines of code for a client. "Man," I heard him say under his breath, "that's cool. I'd love to be able to do something like that."

"But you do," I told him as I turned. "You build stuff, I build stuff. We have different raw materials and tools, but what we do isn't really so different."

He looked surprised and more than a little self-satisfied as he answered, "Yeah, you know, you're right."

That's really the point of this series of articles: to fill your toolbelt with all the open source tools you'll need to build a quality podcast. You'll need a hammer and nails, a saw, a speed square, a tape measure, a utility knife, and a pouch full of wood screws. You'll need a little knowledge of the strengths of each and a bit of dexterity to manipulate them. You'll need an understanding of the raw materials. And, you'll need a process that works under a broad range of circumstances.

While your tool belt will contain quite a few tools, few are more important or utilitarian than the hammer. You can put things together and break things apart with a hammer. It can be a bit unwieldy, intended as it is for gross tasks rather than fine. But, it's the tool you'll reach for the most often in your podcast building project.

And, like hammers in the real world, audio editors in Linux come in a variety of sizes and weights. There's Rezound, Ardour, Sweep, Muse, and a full range of other editors, each targeted to specific audio editing tasks.

For overall flexibility and ease of use, it's tough to find a better open source audio editor than Audacity. I like to think of it as the 22-ounce framing hammer of open source audio tools. Audacity will do a lot of things and a lot of things well. But, its real mission is the brute force task of capturing and assembling all the discrete pieces of your podcast. In the case of a music podcast like The Roadhouse, that might be songs and musical segments, voiceovers and transition pieces (or "bumpers") that give your podcast its distinctive flair. For voice-only podcasts like The ClarkCast, those pieces may include intros and outros, interviews, or long narratives that need "uhm"s and "ah"s removed for clarity. While the range of tasks will vary by podcast type and the style of the podcaster, the tools in Audacity will help meet your basic needs.

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