Music enthusiasts and professionals that are on a budget should look for audio editing applications that are free to use while providing professional-grade options to ease the cost of starting up an independent studio. Using coupons to help buy new audio and video equipment makes it possible to save even more money, thereby increases your productivity and creating the most effective studio for your needs.
Audacity
Audacity provides professional level audio-editing for free. The program provides support for all types of audio formats, and allows the user to add extensions to increase the functionality of the program. For those working with Virtual Studio Technology, the program allows you to access VSTs through the VST plugin option. Audacity also offers filters for compressing audio, manipulating audio data, correcting pitch and basic functions such as cutting, splicing and recombining audio. When it comes to a full-featured audio editing application, Audacity provides superior functionality and an extensive online collection of support files.
WaveSurfer
WaveSurfer functions a lot like Audacity and provides users with a graphical user interface to manipulate audio data. The best recording companies often send their final recordings through several different compressors before finalizing a recording. WaveSurfer provides an excellent second option for mastering audio data since it uses slightly different filters than Audacity. Using WaveSurfer in addition to Audacity provides excellent, high quality master recordings.
Handbrake
Handbrake provides video editing and encoding capabilities to edit and manipulate your video files. The software supports several video output formats including H.264, MPEG-4, MPEG-2 or Theora. The user interface allows users to quickly skim through chapters and titles on a video, change subtitles and preview the video live. Additionally, there are several filters including deinterlacing, detelecine, deblock, decomb, grayscale, cropping and scaling. With so many advanced features Handbrake offers the best open-source utility for editing videos.
Linux Multimedia Studio
Linux Multimedia Studio provides users with a complete Digital Audio Workstation for their music-editing needs. Users create songs via a MIDI keyboard, song editor or a rhythm and bass line editor. The program also comes with a variety of plugins to add instrument sounds and effects to their original compositions. Whether you want to create a new composition or simply record sounds and then manipulate them into something new and creative with the sound editing tools, Linux Multimedia Studio provides a powerful suite of tools for free.
MuseScore
For composers that can’t afford the more expensive notation programs like Sibelius or Finale, MuseScore fills a need. MuseScore allows composers to create professional quality music notation using a graphical interface. Most other open-source notation programs like LilyPond require the user to learn to use code. Since using code is counter-intuitive to the music creation process, users with a basic understanding of musical notation can jump right in and begin creating original works with MuseScore. When projects are completed, printing, saving as an image or creating a PDF from the score is possible.
What editing programs do you use in your studio?
Bio: Steven Miller is a tech enthusiast that has a master’s degree in electronic music composition and has been writing about audio editing techniques for over 10 years. Being a starving artist makes him a frugal shopper that relies coupons and discounts to get new equipment, and free open source software create his work.
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