Anyone using Audacity?

bitflipper
I'm perfectly happy with AA3, which does everything I can imagine ever needing from an audio editor. Yes, it's old, but it's not like it'll just stop working anytime soon. 

I did just try invoking audacity (from a DOS command line, not from SONAR) with a wave file pathname as an argument, and it worked (it's the only command line argument Audacity supports). That, AFAIK, is the only prerequisite for compatibility with SONAR.

jbraner

Sixfinger
So what is it you would do in an audio editor that you couldn't do in Sonar, or prefer to do in an editor?
 

I like to call it from within SONAR to mess around with clips.
 
Also - for finished songs - I use it to trim, run through Ozone 5 for "mastering", and convert to 16 bit for burning to CD. It's just easier with a WAV editor. (but not worth >£200) ;-)
 
For finished songs, you can just export a wave file in 24 bit and process with Audacity for trimming and 16-bit conversion. I use Audacity for all kinds of things, including just simple stereo recording...e.g. converting LPs. Similarly, you can export clips to wave (although that is a bigger hassle to go out and in). I can't imagine what i would do with a clip that I can't do in SONAR...particularly now with Melodyne Editor so neatly integrated.

CakeAlexS
Audacity (latest version) backs the file up and then works off that backup file. I think there is an option to turn this off so it works directly on the file.

jbraner
Point taken dub. It's just my paranoia about AA3 getting a little long in the tooth - and way beyond any kind of support. I'm waiting for some Windows 8 update to make it stop working ;-)

mudgel
It's focus is purely on editing audio. Consequently it presents a very clean screen view of an audio file and you can easily drill down to the sample level for editing. Considering that it's open source and free, it has a very extensive palette of tools and proprietary plugins.

I generally use Sound Forge though for Mastering and any fine editing; but it can be integrated into Sonar's Utility menu allowing you to pass selected segments, clips and or complete tracks to SF for editing and then pass the processed audio back to your project from where it was taken. Very seamless.

The reasons are multiple.
It provides me a disconnect from my recording and mixing environment.
It works completely differently with different tools. It helps reinforce that I'm doing a different job.
It has batch processing tools that are excellent for repetitive tasks.

Hope that helps.