audio

Audio editing

For use with music
Editors designed for use with music typically allow the user to do the following:
* Record audio from one or more inputs and store recordings in the computer's memory as digital audio

* Edit the start time, stop time, and duration of any sound on the audio timeline
* Mix multiple sound sources/tracks, combine them at various volume levels and pan from channel to channel to one or more output tracks
* Apply simple or advanced effects or filters, including compression, expansion, flanging, reverb, audio noise reduction and equalization to change the audio

* Playback sound (often after being mixed) that can be sent to one or more outputs, such as speakers, additional processors, or a recording medium
* Conversion between different audio file formats, or between different sound quality levels
Typically these tasks can be performed in a manner that is both non-linear and non-destructive.

Audio editing

is the process of taking recorded sound and changing it directly on the recording medium (analog) or in RAM (digital).

Audio editing was a new technology that developed in the middle part of the 20th century with the advent of magnetic tape recording. Prior to magnetic tape, editing (and the repairing of breaks) was performed on wire recorders with solder and extra wire to reinforce the new joint. After World War II, reel-to-reel tape machines became prevalent and edits were made with straight razors and "splicing" tape to connect pieces of magnetic tape that had been cut. Audio editors would listen to recorded tapes at low speeds, and then located specific sounds using a process called scrubbing, which is the slow rocking back and forth of the tape reels across the playback heads of the tape deck.

With the development of microcomputer technology, sound recordists were able to digitize their recordings and edit them as files within a computer's RAM. The earliest audio editor was written by Soundstream Inc specifically for the PDP-11 minicomputer platform. Digital audio workstations appeared using proprietary software and hardware solutions but after the personal computer became widely available in the mid '80s, much the power of a DAW came into the hands of home and small business users through software audio editing programs written specifically for personal computers. The earliest program to become widely used in this application was a wave editor called Sound Designer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sound Designer was created by a company called Digidesign who achieved early industry dominance. Today, the most popular retail audio editing programs not associated with specific hardware are: Audacity, Adobe Audition, Sound Forge, Samplitude, Adobe Soundbooth and Goldwave.^{[citation needed]}

In recent years, a number of free software software projects have sprung up in order to develop an open source audio editing program. This movement has been bolstered recently by the development of ALSA, and the low latency kernel patch to the Linux kernel which allows it to achieve audio processing performance equal to that of commercial operating systems. The multi-platform package Audacity is currently the most fully-featured free software audio editor.