ITauthor

I usually use an old copy of Cubase I have to edit my podcasts. However, I can only run it on one computer and I don't want to uninstall it from my home XP machine to put it on my work Vista laptop, which is what I use most of the time these days.

So I've been trying to use Audacity again. I tried it out a while back but gave up on it because it falls way short of Cubase in many ways, even though my copy of Cubase must be five or six years old now.

However, I had a week off and spent it in Glen Esk and had plenty of time, so I took my laptop and used Audacity to edit podcast 19 - and interview with my mum. The editing is okay after you get the hang of it, though I still find it awkward having to constantly chop and change tools to do things, and with an absence of right-click menus in places. Cubase is just a lot more intuitive and better designed to allow you to do the things you want to do, chopping and moving stuff around quickly.

But the main problem I had was just now when I finally got round to outputting the finished recording to MP3. It came out sounding really bad - particularly, for some reason, the intro/outro music. Even upping it to 128 Mbps didn't improve things. The spoken voice sounded okay but the music sounded really tinny and warbly.

I guessed it was something to do with Audacity's MP3 codec, so I tried outputting to WAV and it seems that I was correct because the 16-bit WAV output sounded fine, and a 32-bit WAV file sounded just like the original, but resulted in a 987 MB file.

I then downloaded FormatFactory (which I'd seen recommended on LifeHacker) and tried converting the 32-bit file. This failed, but the 16-bit PCM WAV file worked fine and the resulting MP3 file sounds about as good as the results I get from Cubase. It's annoying to have to introduce yet more steps into the process of producing a podcast.

However, although I can't recommend Audacity (despite all the plaudits it gets) I can recommend FormatFactory, which is dead easy to use and seems to do the job nicely.