When Sportscaster Life launched on January 5th, one of the fresh content blog posts that went along with it was my Top Video Editors for Sportscasters for producing highlights and other digital content. Today I want to take a look at something probably a lot more commonly used and likely a lot more important and that’s my favourite audio editors.
I use two on a daily basis, however for this blog post I’m going to through in one more that I’ve used in the past and let you know what I don’t use it anymore. We’ll start with my two favourites:
Audacity
In its simplicity is where Audacity shines and that’s why I use this for 85% of my audio work. Audacity’s light weight setup and easy to use interface make it ideal to quickly import, trim and export clips from the internet or my audio recorder. It features some basic, yet powerful audio tools that let you play around with the audio a bit, and it is also capable of working in multi-track mode, giving you the ability to mix tracks or overlay elements. I use this to build a lot of my pre-recorded intermission content and features that air on the show.
It’s also the handiest computer-based recorder I’ve found. I use Audacity to record my broadcast from start to finish, allowing me to export and/or play back elements from it such as goal calls or other highlights. Everything you do with it is quick and easy, installation is simple as well. It’s also an open source project, which means the community at large is working on and improving it with each version. Oh….best of all? It’s completely free.
Sony Vegas Pro
I covered this in the Top Video Editors for Sportscasters post I referenced earlier, but it’s worth another mention because Sony Vegas originated as an audio-only editor and still has its roots deeply in the music and audio production realms.
Where Vegas excels is its usability out of the box. All of your audio (and video) elements are drag and drop, fades automatically happen when you overlap one element on another and everything just happens very easily. Vegas is fantastic for music mixing, beat creation and other intense audio production needed. For sportscasters (and myself), it is very useful for more complicated audio elements on your show such as intros, teases and other produced elements. I create throws to break, league ranking updates, intros, extros and everything in Vegas that combine voice over with music and highlights. I could probably do the same in Audacity, but I like Vegas’ interface much better and find it easier to adjust the placement of audio tracks.
The downside is the cost, it’s not free. You can find out more about it here.
Adobe Audition
Adobe Audition would be the middle child if Audacity and Sony Vegas were brothers. The program features elements from both and creates a complete audio solution and is ideal for anyone looking to run just one program.
For recording, Audition is a very popular tool in radio and is used in both live on air and commercial production. It’s clear, produces a nice waveform and has some very good trimming and editing tools to get you started. For editing, its multi track tool is very similar to Vegas Pro’s and has a drag and drop feature for mixing multiple tracks and layers of audio.
So why don’t I use Adobe Audition? I find it bulky. For me, the only audio program running during my broadcast is Audacity, which is low resource-requiring and runs beautifully in the background. Audition, like many of Adobe’s products are so feature-packed that they can take up a lot of computer resources. That being said, it’s just my opinion. Several broadcasters that I have worked with swear by Audition, and not only use it as a record and editing program, but also as a playback feature for intermission and other pre-recorded content.
Much like Vegas, it’s not free. You can find out more on Adobe Audition here.
