“As much as you may love your pet lion, you likely can’t ride it.”
That’s the last line of a very fun story I did for KBIA, the mid-Missouri NPR affiliate, about a couple who aren’t being safe about their mini-zoo of wild animals in Columbia, Missouri. I found it using only data from the USDA (take that, data skeptics!) and produced it with free tools like Audio Hijack and Audacity.
But… my cavernous appetite for free tools may have finally reached its limit with Audacity. It’s pretty much the only completely free audio editing software out there, and it can be a major pain if you’re used to professional programs like Adobe Audition. To be fair, it does have everything you’d need in an audio editor: tracks, timelines, fade in and out, amplification, normalization.
But it’s such a pain to use, based on everything from the scrolling to the audio levels to the track system. I tried Fission, from our quirky friend Rogue Amoeba, but wasn’t willing to commit to the $29 for a one-off story. My friend Alan, a freelance radio reporter, recommended two alternatives:
- Hindenburg ($99 with a 30-day free trial)
- Reaper ($60 but payment is on the honor system)
So this is kind of a TFR in reverse: I used Audacity, but I’m not exactly recommending it. Has anyone used Hindenburg, Reaper, Fission, or another program they’d like to share? I’ll share with the group.