Audacity and SKYPE

Compare and contrast on 2 technologies Audacity and SKYPE

Introduction

From the first word or gesture made, to the latest in communication technology like Skype, man has had the desire to communicate with each other. Communication in general terms is the process of transmission of meaningful information to the receiver by the sender. Communication can also be done over vast distances at different time and space as the receiver does not need to be present at the time of communication. Humans being social creatures by nature need to communicate with each other in one way or another. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a person needs to satisfy their love and belonging needs by interacting with each other increasing the need of means which can be used to communicate. Whereas Audacity is one of the digital sound editor and recorder but it is amongst the best of those which are available for free. It can work on Windows, Mac, Linux and multiple other operating systems. It was launched by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger dannenberg from the Carnegie Mellon University. In this paper, we try to compare and contrast these two technologies audacity and SKYPE.

Discussion

Audacity has recently launched its version 2.0.0 on March 13th. Data from the internet suggests that it was the 11th most downloaded software from Sourforge.net (10th Oct 2011) numbering to about 75.6 million downloads. The software has won the website's Community choice award for best multimedia project in the years 2007 and 2009. The software has been made to function as post-processors for a wide range of audio file types and those include podcasts. It provides different audio effects which include trimming, normalization and in and out fading effects. It can be used to record and mix albums. The success of and efficiency of Audacity software can be judged by the fact that it is being used currently in the OCR National Level 2 IC and being taught for sound creation courses.

Some of the many features presented in the Audacity software include:

Facility to import or export files of AIFF, MP3 and WAV varieties. Majorly all files are supported by the library of the software.

Audacity version 1.3.2 added support facility for FLAC format and then later introduced support for WMA, AMR, AAC and AC3 file formats in the version 1.3.6

User can record and play back the sounds.

Editing is made easy by introducing simple cut, copy and paste options. Multiple tracks can be mixed. A wide variety of digital effects and plug-ins are introduced and further more effects can be created using Nyquist. It has amplitude envelope functions as well as noise removal with ease.

Audio analysis can be done with the use of transformation algorithms. The software supports multi-channel modes with rates reaching 96 kHz with 32 bits each audio sample.

Speed audio adjustments with precision are possible and this can be done without altering the pitch of the original sample and vice verse is possible.

Easy navigation between projects and files and the function to convert ...