Audacity

Screen shot of audacity running on the OLPC.

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds, which works on the OLPC using build 650.

Possible uses

A simplified (simpler interface, slimmed down, stabilized) Audacity activity would make an excellent tool for...

• citizen journalism... As a radio journalist, all you would need is an OLPC, with Audacity and an FTP client installed (or integrated), to create radio packages.
• song creation... almost all commercial songs use some sort of multi-track editor for creation -- so many songs have been created using Audacity!
• sound effect creation ("Foley artistry")... recording and performing various filters on short sounds with Audacity are how many sound effects for some XO games (Kuku, Spray Play, Bounce) were made at the Boston Game Jam 2007)

Installation

To install Audacity, go to the Terminal activity, and type

sudo yum install audacity

• Answer y to any installation questions. The installation typically requires about 6 to 7 megabytes of disk space.
• Type

audacity

to launch Audacity. You will be asked to choose a language, then the application will run.

This can be wrapped into a Sugar activity by following the Pippy shell command example to simply run "audacity", then "Keep"ing the Pippy instance "As an activity".

Resource Usage

(For recording, software playthrough is turned on)

• Recording, fist track, project rate 16000 hz:

2272 olpc 20 0 63008 25m 13m S 47.4 11.1 0:40.10 audacity

• Recording, first track, project rate 48000 hz:

2272 olpc 20 0 65732 28m 13m S 58.7 12.3 1:51.16 audacity

• Idle after recording one track:

2272 olpc 20 0 62608 25m 13m R 5.3 11.0 1:38.67 audacity

Known bugs

• "Change pitch" crashes Audacity (Audacity 0:1.3.2-21.fc9 using latest Joyride)

Expression 'SetApproximateSampleRate( pcm, hwParams, sr )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_
linux_alsa.c', line: 1114                                                                 
Expression 'PaAlsaStreamComponent_InitialConfigure( &self->capture, inParams, self->primeB
uffers, hwParamsCapture, &realSr )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 16
65                                                                                        
Expression 'PaAlsaStream_Configure( stream, inputParameters, outputParameters, sampleRate,
 framesPerBuffer, &inputLatency, &outputLatency, &hostBufferSizeMode )' failed in 'src/hos
tapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 1789                                                    
Illegal instruction

• Console warnings on launch (Audacity 0:1.3.2-21.fc9 using latest Joyride)

Expression 'SetApproximateSampleRate( pcm, hwParams, sr )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_
linux_alsa.c', line: 1114                                                                 
Expression 'PaAlsaStreamComponent_InitialConfigure( &self->capture, inParams, self->primeB
uffers, hwParamsCapture, &realSr )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 16
65                                                                                        
Expression 'PaAlsaStream_Configure( stream, inputParameters, outputParameters, sampleRate,
 framesPerBuffer, &inputLatency, &outputLatency, &hostBufferSizeMode )' failed in 'src/hos
tapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 1789                                                    

Enabling mp3 export

It should be possible to install LAME lib files for mp3 support within Audacity, but nobody has documented how to do it or reported success.

External Links

• http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Official Audacity website.
• http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=801.0 Thread on the olpcnews forum about installing Audacity on the XO.