Comparative Analysis

The objective of this page is to correctly identify strengths and weaknesses of Audacity with a view to informing future directions. As well as comparing to specific programs, this page will (in time) link to papers on specific audio algorithms that are of interest to us. This is a developer page, and is not intended to recapitulate Feature Requests. Rather it is to compare the algorithms we use to best practice.

This page is partly inspired by the pages and it is intended that it will move more in that direction over time.

Competitive Analysis
Comparisons to commercial software and algorithms the details of which are not openly published.

See: AudacityComparisons

Collaborative Analysis
Comparisons to open source software some of which we could potentially link up to.

See: Other Programs


 * Ardour: Does edits 'by reference' rather than Audacity's blockfile system. Very high quality software.  Also supports midi control surfaces.  Only experimental versions on Windows (so far), and reluctance to release on Windows because of the potential support/development load.
 * Blender: Has a simple built in audio editor with few audio file formats supported.
 * Praat: A research tool, with particular strength in vocal synthesis from first principles.
 * Clam: A flow graph based system based on Qt. Like Praat it is also a research tool, but more conducive to plug-together customization