Get Going Quickly with the Powerful Audacity Audio Platform

We've covered Audacity on a number of occasions.  Audacity is an audio production platform that compares very well with software used in professional environments, including tools for silencing ambient noise, combining, cutting, moving, and mixing tracks. Its mixboard and equalization features are awesome, and it's also a great podcasting platform.

A few very useful, free guides and workbooks are now available that can help you master this awesome audio program quickly. Here is how to get going. 

FLOSS Manuals, which delivers free guides to many open source software projects, has an outstanding guide to learning Audacity, available here.  The FLOSS Manuals workbook is structured into three sections; basic use, proficient use and advanced use. You can get going quickly with it.

Meanwhile, the Audacity community has produced a fairly exhaustive manual, although it is not as easy to follow as the FLOSS Manuals workbook.

While you're at it, you may want to investigate some of the other excellent, free audio projects available online. Here are a few to look into:

Hydrogen. Hydrogen is an incredibly sophisticated Linux drum machine platform.  It lets you program cool beats, and includes tools for sample editing. You can also find good videos showing how it works on YouTube.

 Rakarrak. Are you a guitarist? If so, you're probably familiar with how sophisticated pedalboards and stomp boxes have become. Rakarrak is a powerful multi-effects processor emulating a guitar effects pedalboard. It's available on SoureForge and you can listen to demos of its flexible capabilities here. It's designed for Linux distributions with Jack Audio Connection Kit, which you can get here.

Sonicvisualiser.  Sonicvisualiser has become a very popular tool for studying what's actually inside digital audio recordings. It was developed at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary, University of London. It's available for Linux, OS/X, and Windows, and lets you see visualizations of your music recordings including synthesized annotations and more. This is a fun tool to tinker with for musicians.