Any DAWs offer decent editing of wave recording?

[kbongosmusic]

I have been using Audacity for multi-track overdub recordings. My work flow has mainly been to just have fun and try and record a number of tracks, take the good, throw the bad away. I have found the editing allowed by Audacity fairly painless - listen, and cut out(delete) spots that I don't like. Maybe apply the fade in/out to clean up the edits.

I've been making an effort at learning some of the other DAW apps - ardour and qtractor. I hope to try out NON soon. Audacity I am starting to see has limitations imposed by the cross-platform focus limitations(jack, midi connection abilities). But the Audacity wave edit is nice and I wonder if any of the others could offer this type of edit capability without too much painful mousing around. I'm not crazy about Audacity's custom storage, seems just a simple WAV file could offer better compatibility. I notice qtractor storing in OGG format. I assume that's a lossless variety. Are there add on edit tools that could help(for editing)? I think some of the non-destructive editing would be nice(Audacity appears lacking in this area), in case I remove something I shouldn't have or want.

[spamatica]

MusE has a basic wave editor with cut/copy/paste fade in/out and amplify etc. There's also a possibility to open an external editor from within MusE for more advanced editing.

[kbongosmusic]

Thanks for the pointer. I didn't try MusE, assuming it was strictly MIDI sequencer, I will give it a spin.

[Joermungand]

It seems to me that what you’re after is exactly the Region concept in Ardour (http://manual.ardour.org/working-with-regions/). What’s wrong with that?

[ssj71]

Audacity is a destructive editor. Once you apply an effect and save, the file is changed on the disk. Ardour is a non-destructive editor by design. All changes are really just meta-data but the actual files on the disk stay untouched, so you can easily have several snapshots with different mixes or various arrangements without needing multiple copies of the files.

There are a very few things that this does model not work very well for, but it has been a very long time since I needed a destructive operation. Everything you mention can be perfectly accomplished by ardour (and I think qtractor, but I'm not as familiar with it).

Audacity is simple and nice, but not really appropriate for larger scale multitrack recordings.

[spamatica]

Thanks for the pointer. I didn't try MusE, assuming it was strictly MIDI sequencer, I will give it a spin.

Nope, it's just as much for recording audio, maybe we could announce it better

Though as ssj71 mentions, what you really should use is non-destructive editing, manipulating wave files is usually a last-resort. MusE does non-destructive editing too but Ardour has more features in this regard.

/Robert

[spamatica]

For some things Audacity is much easier, and then i ex- and import to Ardour (or back).

So my answer. Use a good DAW and Audacity together. Why not?

Yeah, audacity is a great program, it's silly that it can't operate on wave files directly, would fit such a workflow much better.

/Robert

[bluebell]

Cuts, fade-in and -out, crossfading, transpose and time stretch can be done with audio clips directly in Qtractor's audio tracks.

audio_clips_qtractor.png (68.74 KiB) Viewed 1429 times

[ssj71]

But still some handlings are easier in Audacity. Like for instance in one track selecting a part and change the volume of it to correct it with the rest.

if just one region, right click, select gain in the context menu. If you want the whole track louder adjust the fader. There are easy ways to do it, though they may not be obvious.

[spamatica]

Huh? Do you mean the part that you have to import a wave file and after working on it export it?
What's the problem with that?

Nothing except a lot of mouse clicking that would not be needed at all if audacity worked directly on wavs.

/Robert

[Luc]

Great alternatives to Audacity are also Ocenaudio and Tracktion 4. Version 4 is quite old, but still beats the heck out of any basic "wave editor." Who knows, you might end up buying an upgrade.

Both are freeware but not open source, only available at their own websites:
https://www.ocenaudio.com/download
https://www.tracktion.com/products/t4-daw

[spamatica]

Great alternatives to Audacity are also Ocenaudio and Tracktion 4. Version 4 is quite old, but still beats the heck out of any basic "wave editor." Who knows, you might end up buying an upgrade.

Both are freeware but not open source, only available at their own websites:
https://www.ocenaudio.com/download
https://www.tracktion.com/products/t4-daw

Wow, thanks for the links. The linux audio world is getting too big, so many things I have no idea about. Or I'm getting too old. Probably both

[kbongosmusic]

Thanks for all the suggestions! And thanks to FalkTX kx studio pkgs I got Ardour4 up and running on Debian Testing with very little effort. I was able to use a Draw Mode, it allowed to non-destructively set gain and effectively remove bits of my wave recording. Had to draw 4 connection points, where the inner two are pulled down to volume zero to drop out the 'bad' portion, like a bad little guitar lead for example. Ardour4 seems to offer ability to zoom in/out so I think the basics of what I want are there. It was a bit tedious with the mouse to draw and arrange these 4 connection points compared to in Audacity I can just select/highlight the area and then tell it to mute(or something). Sometimes on Audacity I have to further fade in/out the edges of the cut, sometimes not if the notes played had nice quite boundaries. Some built in fading seems to take place with the Draw Mode in Ardour4 that seems good.

There is a selection tool in Ardour4 called Range Mode, let's me quickly highlight a portion of the audio. I think I can tell it to cut this portion, but that seems silly for my needs as it doesn't just quite that portion, but I believe removes it shifting the remaining audio in relation to the other tracks. What would be nice is if I could tell it to take this range and place the 4 connection points so that the selected area would drop out to zero volume. That would effectively match the quick remove I can do with Audacity. I'm very new to Ardour, but I don't think I can ignore it any longer. Seems like the most mature recording software to run, the most obvious choice. Although it's really nice to have alternatives, options, which is a great thing about linux. A big thanks to all the audio developers for making these neat tools. I won't call them toys, because making music is serious business And I know it is really a TON of work to code up these programs(I am a coder in my day job, so I know. At times I wish I were a musician, but then I come to my senses, it's nice to not STARVE. Starving artists, eh? Ugh! Bless you all.) Maybe it's time to look at some Ardour code and see how hard it would be to make a 'drop this range selection volume' quick edit thing. It would probably be a tough, and it's getting harder as I get older to burn the midnight oil so to speak. BUT, the fact that it is do-able is priceless. And maybe it's already there and I just need to RTM. Thanks for the fine Ardour user manual by the way Paul and other Ardour authors.

I've finally got my desktop machines with my m-audio delta card switched over to Debian testing, the kx-studio pkg repo's went in well so now I can more easily run at least some of the latest software. Fun stuff.

[Luc]

Great alternatives to Audacity are also Ocenaudio and Tracktion 4. Version 4 is quite old, but still beats the heck out of any basic "wave editor." Who knows, you might end up buying an upgrade.

Both are freeware but not open source, only available at their own websites:
https://www.ocenaudio.com/download
https://www.tracktion.com/products/t4-daw

Wow, thanks for the links. The linux audio world is getting too big, so many things I have no idea about. Or I'm getting too old. Probably both

Does ocenaudio work for you? It used to work for me, an old version. Then they introduced JACK support and from then on it never worked again. I've tried every version.

[spamatica]

Does ocenaudio work for you? It used to work for me, an old version. Then they introduced JACK support and from then on it never worked again. I've tried every version.

I tried it now, took the mint version and ran it on my Kubuntu 16.04 install. Works when I use pulse audio as backend but with jack configured I can't press play it seems.

/Robert