Recording software

[Queneau]

A friend and I have finally finished writing a thirty minute audio comedy pilot and are doing a test recording on Saturday. Does anyone know of any decent and simple recording software? I was going to use Audacity because it seems simple enough. Again though, this is just a test so I'm open to trying other programs; ones that might be easy to add sound effects and stuff to later.

Cheers.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Audacity will be okay, though it's not the dead easiest programme to actually manipulate elements (ie .wav file snippets), it's very rudimentary.

Try Reaper, you can manipulate sound, add effects and you'll probably find it's easier to mix as well.

[Bored of Canada]

Try Reaper, you can manipulate sound, add effects and you'll probably find it's easier to mix as well.

Yeah, plus Reaper has a timed free trial with full functionality as well, if I remember correctly. Though that may not be current. But yeah, if you feel like you're being constrained by audacity and you're not getting what you want out of it, give Reaper a shot.

_{Also, hey, send us a link when it's done, please! Would love to hear it!}

[Queneau]

Cheers. Are .wav files best to use then - quality wise?

[mcbpete]

Reaper would be ideal for trimming up the audio without affecting the original. Yeah uncompressed wav files would be best when working on it, though when you export it mp3 would be fine (and preferable) for end users.

[Queneau]

Nice one. Cheers.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I agree with mcbpete- record everything to wav (you probably will be doing anyway) and then compress it down later.

Just for info- .wav is the plain sound file that will be generated when you make a recording, which takes up more disk space but is the best quality (unless it's recorded on a pinhole mic on a crappy camera or mp3 players etc in which case the bit rate will be low). If sound quality is important to you, then encode your show to 320K mp3 or .flac which retain a lot of the quality but aren't huge downloads either.

On Audacity and Reaper, you get a timeline and you can manipulate exactly when certain elements come in- if there are sketches this will be very useful as you can overlay soundeffects, background music, and you can play around with a few effects and move the audio around in the sound space- ie, move background music to the left channel, adjust the volume so it dips or peaks exactly when you want it to.

If that doesn't work just shout everyone loves shouting.

[syntaxerror]

I'd like to take this opportunity to say thanks to Peter Quistguard.

[mcbpete]

I'd like to take this opportunity to say thanks to Peter Quistguard.

Hah, my version recently gave up the ghost after updating to win8.1 (It still works but you had to re-register every single time you loaded it up) so have upgraded to the very next version: Adobe Audition 1.5 (post that they rebuilt the code and all became bloated)

[Queneau]

_{Also, hey, send us a link when it's done, please! Would love to hear it!}

Only just saw this. I was going to see if anyone fancied reading it but I don't think I will now. As for the recording, I think I'll have to even though the potential mauling is quite frightening. Still, I'm always happy to hand it out!