Audio Editing Software Recommendations?

[Andy in Sig]

Can anybody recommend a decent audio editing software and how much is it likely to cost? It's not so much the editing that I'm after as the ability to analyse speech patterns e.g. how many (milli)seconds a pause or hesitation lasts. So I guess that it would need to have a decent graphical display of the recordings. I'll be probably be doing MP3 recordings of interviews although the recorder I'm looking at getting also does a format called wav.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Gooch]

Soundforge is good but it doesn't come cheap.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/soundforge

 

[Carwash]

Audacity is free, decent, and cross-platform. Its main interface displays the waveform, which is what it sounds like you're after.

 

[Andy in Sig]

Uncle Mort,

it's Windows.

Gooch and Carwash,

thanks for the tips. I shall investigate. My problem is that I'm not an audio professional so it needs to be fairly idiot proof.

Edit: You're right about soundforge - 339 Euros!!!!

 

[woohoo]

My wife used Audacity to edit recordings when she transferred from LPs (using a USB turntable) to PC without any problems (although she did cheat by reading the manual first ).

 

[Andy in Sig]

I'm just going to be doing really boring stuff: analysing speech patterns. I've had a look at the pdf sample of the Audacity instruction book and it looks like it will do the business, so I will probably start with that software.

 

[goo_mason]

Audacity should do you fine for speech analysis.

I used to use the wonderful 'Segstat' (Segmentation Station) in-house software for speech analysis & segmenting way back when in 1990 when I worked for the Centre For Speech Technology Research at Edinburgh Uni. Ahh... those were the days: time/amp and spectographic waveforms, which I had to phonetically label at the phoneme level.

Wish I could remember anything useful from my Linguistics degree now, but I can't...

 

[Fnaar]

I use wavepad, which I think is excellent (and free) Good graphic display , precise editing etc. I don't have to do any high quality stuff. I guess I mostly use it for 'saving as' mp3, but also have used for analysing spoken word etc.

http://wavepad.en.softonic.com/

 

[Andy in Sig]

Thanks, I'll have a look at that too. That said, I've just ordered the book on how to use Audacity.

 

[thomas]

Audacity is free, decent, and cross-platform. Its main interface displays the waveform, which is what it sounds like you're after.

I'll ...5th? that... Audacity is a nice bit of opensource software!

 

[Andy in Sig]

Audacity is free, decent, and cross-platform. Its main interface displays the waveform, which is what it sounds like you're after.

This is just to say thanks for the recommendation. I downloaded Audacity and bought the "how to use it" book from Amazon. It looks like it's perfect for what I need because I just click and drag on a section of a recording and get the exact measurement of time displayed in milliseconds, so thanks again.

 

[Carwash]

No worries. Delighted it does what you want.

 

[HLaB]

Audacity is free, decent, and cross-platform. Its main interface displays the waveform, which is what it sounds like you're after.

That's the package I use for sound editing. I do nothing special with sounds but is free and I like it.