Free Stuff: Making Movies for Nothing

Quick and Fast: Simply the best totally free DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) out there! Nifty and small, to fit on your footage-filled hard drive.

Where you get it: Audacity.sourceforge.net Windows, Mac and Linux

Audacity is made by volunteers who know what they’re doing, which explains the excellence of the program. It was voted one of the best 100 products of 2008 by PC World Magazine.

Audacity is simply the best DAW I’ve found for free. Besides that, everyone I know who’s into media has it. It’s just a great program. It does everything you need for free and doesn’t take up much room on your hard drive. The default settings on most of the effects work for most things. Audacity can record, edit, mix, master…everything! With this, who needs Pro Tools? 

WARNING! Audacity looks a little different from most audio editing programs. The interface is very basic though, so you shouldn’t be thrown off that much.

One quirk is that Audacity (at least my copy) can only import MP3 and has a hard time with anything else including WAV. OK, that’s an understatement. WAV sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks having a fight. You will want to check out BonkEnc, NCH Switch or some other audio converting program so you can convert your WAVs and other files to MP3 (Audacity has no problem exporting WAV).

lame_enc.dll: Audacity will need this little computer file to export MP3. You can get a free download Here. Once you download lame_enc.dll, you will need to direct Audacity to where it is. When you go to export MP3, Audacity will ask directions to the file, and you can use the dialogue box that pops up to browse to where lame_enc.dll is. You only need to do this once.

Tutorials: Here is where you can find documentation, tutorials, a link to a wiki book and tips! Look at all this stuff!

License and Use: GNU GPL. You own what you create with Audacity as long as the footage itself is not copyrighted. You can use it for commercial purposes.

Demo: I love Audacity and use it all the time. You can go to my website, on the Postproduction page and most of the audio clips on there (except the ones in the music section or if they say otherwise) went through Audacity somewhere. Even the radio commercial was cleaned up in it.

EDIT: That website hasn’t been updated for several months. I don’t intend to ever update it, just so you know.