Audacity development team has released a beta version of Audacity 1.3. The new software includes many additional features for podcasters like FTP uploading, batch processing and transcription tools. It is not considered as a stable release yet but you can download and test it if you want to.

The team claims to have hundreds of new features in this new version, but some of them are still incomplete. Keep an eye of this, as it may become the only audio editing and recording software you will need.

Here are highlights of the new features:

• Collapse/expand tracks - Every track has an upward-pointing triangle at the bottom of the label area on the left side of the track. Click it once to collapse the track to a very small size, and click it again to expand it back to its previous size.
• Multiple clips per track - You can split a single track into multiple clips. You can move these clips around between different tracks, making it easy to construct complex compositions out of hundreds of smaller audio samples.
• Selection bar - The current selection is now replaced by a fully functional Selection Bar, which displays and controls the current selection (your choice of Start and End, or Start and Length), and the current audio position.
• Improved label tracks - adds support for overlapping labels, and support for modifying both the left and right edge of the label region just by clicking and dragging.
• QuickTime and Audio Units on Mac OS X - Audacity can now import any audio file supported by Apple’s QuickTime technology. This includes .MOV and .MP4 (AAC) files. No support for encrypted audio files though.
• Better performance with large projects - now uses a hierarchical directory structure that results in better performance on large projects (tens of hours worth of audio across many tracks).
• Project integrity check on open - When you open an Audacity project in version 1.3, it checks to make sure that all data files are present.
• Transcription toolbar - A new toolbar for creating transcriptions of speech in Label Tracks. Includes features that enable you to change the playback speed, create labels automatically based on onsets, and more. To enable this feature, go to the Interface tab of the Preferences.
• Upload via FTP - An experimental new dialog for uploading files to a server via FTP. Currently it is just a simple FTP client; in the future we will integrate this feature into Audacity more so you can publish a project directly to a site as a Podcast, for example.
• Batch / CleanSpeech - allows you to process a bunch of files, for example normalizing and converting to MP3. The CleanSpeech mode provides a simplified interface for some standard adjustments typically made on speech recordings.
• Cut lines - When enabled, cutting audio in the middle of a clip does not remove it permanently - at any time in the future, just click on the cut line to restore it.

If you are looking to start your own podcast, try this software before looking anywhere else. With these new features, I don’t hesitate this software should be installed on every podcaster’s recording desktop.

Link: Audacity.
Other option: Podcast Software.

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