Youwashock is the best plugin it is used to make your voice crispier use it . it is damm good search it on google for download bro

Depends on the music you (want to) make, I guess, but I just got the PaulStretch VST for my Ableton sessions, which I know from Audacity as pre-installed. Magical for Ambient, Sound Designing and installation-inspired work

Reaper would be a great upgrade. It’s “free” in the sense that you get a trial which just gives you a pop up at the beginning. There are tons of free vst plugins to use with it. Audacity is extremely limited and not really a full daw

You will need to learn how an advanced DAW works compared to audacity. I've used pro tools and cakewalk primarily and the interface is different but the concepts are the same. It's probably worth reading through the online cakewalk documentation in some capacity. I don't know your goals but it's better to grow into something rather than find something only slightly more capable than audacity imo. It's really not too difficult once you get the basics working for you. A lot of is just knowing where to right-click. You'll have the ability to create pro sounding tracks with Cakewalk.

Bandlab Cakewalk. free for windows. Been using cakewalk since it was SONAR. Over 15 years. The stock plugins are real good and you can use any 3rd party. I haven't come across anything you can't do with cakewalk.

Tracktion's Waveform works pretty well for me as a DAW.

Reaper+Vital+Synth1+ other popular free plugins (google "free vst 2022") is all you need.

If you have the money - NI Komplete / Komplete Ultimate is a great start and covers a lot of basis. (wait for the summer sale in June).

If you want more orchestral / Cinematic sounds (like for video games or film scoring) then Spitfire Labs + NI Komplete Start + Project Sam Free Orchestra + Sine Player with their free strings and whatever else + Soundpaint (comes with a free piano). All this is free and legit.

Reaper license is only $60 and has an endless evaluation period that only pops a window and asks if you are still evaluating.

I'm pretty sure you can load normal VSTs in there. But just so you know there's tons of free software licences right now so you don't have to use audacity if it's a price constraint.

Most of the major DAWs have free 90 day licences so you can try all of them out before quarantine is over most likely.

Get a proper DAW, such as Reaper.

i second plugins, i've also been having fun with piping the audio through guitar pedals and playing with the knobs as it records back into the program. makes me feel so cool

You can use third party VSTs in audacity!

> a lot of plugins like Fabfilter, Ozone, AOM, Voxengo, IK multimedia, etc….all work well in Audacity.

That doesn't make Audacity a good tool for the job. You can dig a hole with a hammer, too, but it's going to take you a lot longer.

> the sound quality isn’t any different?

And the hole you dig with a hammer is still going to be a hole, but the guy using the shovel gets there orders of magnitude faster.

Tools matter. The advantage of using Audacity if you already know it, is that you don't have to learn a new tool. However, you're not actually saving time. In a real DAW, you have routing, automation, everything is non-destructive, you have MIDI and VSTis, etc. it's just a vastly different paradigm.

Audacity is an audio editor that has accumulated some DAW-like features over the years, but it's not DAW.

I agree. I personally use FL studio and Pro tools. I used Audacity recently and it was just as good. Just wondering why it gets a lot of hate

Audacity supports VSTs, doesn't it? So it has everything you'd need.

True, the skill of the person using the software matters more than the software itself. if Audacity gets the job done for someone, that's what counts...

The "hate" from Audacity, is I think, misguided. Do what you want and what works best for you. I have a friend that has made three albums in Audacity. The issues you'll run into with Audacity simply have to do with how clunky and difficult the workflow is compared to other audio editing solutions - and that's where Audacity runs into a wall. It's not really a DAW. It's an audio editing software that has some crossovers with DAWs.

Ozone will work the same in Pro Tools as it does in Audacity, but once you start using a more professional DAW, all the myriad drawbacks that Audacity has will become apparent quickly.

I started on Audacity and still have it installed and have a fondness for it, but I rarely open it because there are just so many other tools that do the job faster and easier by orders of magnitude.

That being said, I will add that if you plan on making music in this day and age, I can't think of a compelling reason why you would use Audacity. All things being equal, besides opening some weird file types, Audacity has been eclipsed by a lot of other tools. I wouldn't recommend people get too adjusted to the workflow if they want to do serious mixing and recording.

You can process plugins in real time now and even arrange them in the order you want. They’ve improved many things

> If you're using the same effects and workflows, the sound will be the same.

The point is you can't use the same workflows. Yes, it could sound the same, in the same sense that a hole dug with a hammer could look the same, but the workflow is vastly less efficient.

However, that's a bit of a dodge. The fact is, it won't sound the same, because it's so much harder to do basic things in Audacity, that you won't do them. A better analogy is digging a pool with an excavator. You're just not going to do that with a hammer. You aren't going to be ducking frequencies on track X and Y with your drum bus, for instance, because that kind of routing is nearly impossible. You could achieve the same affect by hand crafting EQ curves and applying them to a millisecond of audio at a time, but it would take you 100 years.

I'll pick a specific DAW, to give a more specific comparison: Reaper. Reaper has MIDI (huge pile of a capability, hugely important in modern mixing, for things like drum replacement and tempo maps), has real-time FX racks with internal routing, per-clip FX chains, parallel FX processing, arbitrary side-chaining, parameter modulation, deep automation (hugely important), comping, versioning, subprojects, slip editing, ripple editing, razor editing, stretch markers, monitor FX, huge undo buffers, automatic backups (with the ability to return to a project version from a month ago, because all editing is non-destructive), vastly deeper rendering options, full blown scripting, hardware send/returns, so on and so forth ad infinitum. Things like ARA2 support, for using best-in-class vocal tuning and alignment tools (e.g. Melodyne, VocAlign), simply don't exist in Audacity and never will.

They aren't the same class of tool. Audacity is an audio editor with very modest aspirations in the DAW direction.

ACX Check, Punch Copy-Punch Paste

TDR Nova : it's a real-time equalizer (which Audacity lacks) and multi-band compressor.

Theres a pretty good Google doc that gives a general tutorial (+ links to required FREE extensions) on how to get your audio to sound nice post-recording but it leans towards a more bass-ier voice, so take it for what you will.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fmS0Wp6EantjSmQiBnPWyCCOSNpiawjgCOdUJknKbnE/edit?usp=drivesdk

compressor EQ and limiter

After I've done all the narration, I make sure to go through the following editing.

Noise Cancellation (Absolute MUST to have decent quality)

Equalization (look on youtube for walkthroughs of which settings give you a good EQ curve for voice)

Normalization

Compression

Then re-do the Normalization.

Quality comes out much better than the raw recording before edits.

1. Get a mic that is not the Blue Yeti (I love the Rode Podmic USB)
2. Get it about three finger widths from you and point it at the corner of your mouth.
3. Have a windscreen/pop filter
   Check out Mike's Video https://youtu.be/WsmMMKRZp5g?si=dUsIEp7HjXEkvOOi

Moderator Required full disclosure: I am the head of Podcasting at Podpage and the founder of the School of Podcasting.

Define "professional". If you are talking about why your voice doesn't sound like you THOUGHT it should sound, no.

That is just what you sound like. We all went through it.

Hmmm. I currently use Hindenburg which I love. I used to use audacity until change of ownership and the negative news that came of it. How did that all pan out?

I am just starting out and will be using Audacity so this is good information

Really excited for the master channel options. Haven’t upgraded yet, but looking forward to it!!! They’ve really been dropping some cool updates in the past year or so. 🎉

I use Audacity to edit my podcast, but don't use (or know) all of the features. Can anyone recommend a good training video to "master" the platform?

Supermassive Valhalla reverb and TDR Nova EQ

>"space alien like".

Space Modulator ? ... https://valhalladsp.com/shop/modulation/valhalla-space-modulator/ (free)

Go on plugins4free.com, browse stuff you're interested in, and download the VSTs. Not all VSTs are compatible, but many are. You'll just have to try them out and see if they work or not.