Audacity alternatives (macOS)

[mouse]

As of October 2019, the current major release of macOS is Catalina. Unfortunately, Audacity — the language learners favourite audio editing software — does not work on Catalina. I was hoping they would release a patch or something to fix the problem, but so far nothing.

 

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with different audio editors on macOS. Obviously I could just search for them myself, but I'm specifically interested in finding an alternative language learning tool. With Audacity, you could easily import an mp3, see the wave forms, select the bit you wanted to and repeat it to your heart's content. Is there anything that can do that on a Mac that isn't bloated and expensive? Thanks.

[RobynElizabeth]

Hi for some reason it works for some of us including me. Have you checked out this thread , it has some ways to get it to work :

https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=107091

[mungouk]

This is really a question for Audacity forums, such as  https://forum.audacityteam.org/ . 

 

Audacity is an audio-editing tool of course, and not a language learning tool per se.

 

Personally I'm holding off moving to Catalina for as long as possible... I usually update about a year after new Mac OS upgrades come out, so that the new wrinkles have been ironed out... whereas moving to 64-bit only binaries is a pretty huge jump. 

 

 

[mouse]

7 minutes ago, mungouk said:

This is really a question for Audacity forums, such as  https://forum.audacityteam.org/ . 

 

Maybe I haven't made myself clear. I use Audacity as a language learning tool. Others here do the same. I would like to hear from others who are in the same boat as me. 

[mungouk]

OK fair point — maybe I mis-read your question. 

 

But Audacity really is only one of very many audio editing tools, albeit a very good one that works on many platforms. I'm a big fan.

 

Maybe you could say exactly what you want to do: for example slowing down audio, chopping it into smaller pieces, ... 等等

 

 

[mouse]

48 minutes ago, RobynElizabeth said:

Hi for some reason it works for some of us including me. Have you checked out this thread , it has some ways to get it to work :

https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=107091

 

Yeah I've seen the terminal fix. Would still be interested in an alternative programme though.

19 minutes ago, mungouk said:

Maybe you could say exactly what you want to do

 

I already did.

[murrayjames]

Since you are using macOS, why not try GarageBand? It does what you need, is easy to use, and you don’t need to buy it.

[TheWind]

if all you are doing is cutting up the audio and replaying it, then pretty much any audio editing software would work. 

 

a few others that work with Mac include

 

cu base

protools 

logic

 

you could also do a Google search for different DAWs (digital audio workplace) most of which will be for Mac as it's the preferred OS for audio. 

[murrayjames]

Yes, pretty much any audio editing software would work. But feature-rich DAWs like ProTools are expensive and have a steeper learning curve than GarageBand, which macOS users can download for free.

[carlo]

Not sure if Praat still works on Catalina, but the last update is very recent. Quite powerful for language learning (you can analyse pitch contours, prosody, spectrograms etc). If you don't need all those superpowers Garageband would be more than enough.

[TheWind]

22 hours ago, murrayjames said:

But feature-rich DAWs like ProTools are expensive and have a steeper learning curve than GarageBand,

 

this is true, better stick to something user friendly and free based on your needs for it

[Leslie Frank]

when i started seeing messages that audacity wouldn't work on newer systems, i stopped updating my imac. some of my other apps like wiretap studio no longer work. so for now, i'm still able to use audacity on mojave. i'm also using wavepad and mixpad (both supposedly work with catalina), only because i've had bad crashes with audacity when i do my podcasts. i still use audacity to record stuff. in the past, ppl have been able to revert back to an older macOS, so if you still wanna use audacity, you could try doing that. all the best.