audio editor

[tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org (Tom Metro)]

Any recommendations for an audio editor (for Linux) that would be good 
for normalizing, (dynamic range) compressing, and noise reducing a voice 
recording? (I have a few voice recordings that were made on low quality 
hardware, and they have digitization noise artifacts that sound like 
static.)

I tried Audacity, as that's what I hear mentioned most often, and I found:

-It locked up X twice. (Once with 1.3.7, as packaged for Ubuntu 9.04, 
and again with 1.3.10, that I backported from 9.10.)

-The normalizer doesn't normalize that much. It's supposed to eliminate 
DC offsets, if that option is checked, but it doesn't work unless only a 
small sample of audio is selected. (I'm guessing it averages the entire 
selection to find the center point, so if the DC offset wavers over the 
selected area, it does nothing.)

-The compressor doesn't compress. The expectation is that dynamic range 
compression should take any audio below a threshold and amplify it, 
while leaving peaks above that threshold as-is. It worked some, but 
given the adjustments it provides, I should have been able to boost all 
but the highest peaks to be near full volume. All I seemed to be able to 
do was raise the noise floor. (An expected side effect, but the 
medium-volume audio should have gotten much louder too.)

-The noise reduction filter had no effect. It has some UI problems too. 
You're supposed to select a portion of the audio that contains only the 
noise, enter the effect's dialog and click a button, which exits the 
dialog. Then select the range you want to process and re-enter the 
effect's dialog, and hit a different button. This is a pretty clumsy 
design, and the dialog provides no feedback as to whether it has a noise 
sample stored. In any case, multiple attempts produced no noticeable 
difference, regardless of the settings.

I'm hoping there is something better available.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/