It’s Music to my Ears
Getting dirty with audacity
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been a fan of music. Music speaks to you in so many ways. It can help you through tough times by knowing that successful artists have experienced similar things, or it might help you feel better by listening to a certain tune which invokes emotion within. Listening to a song during an amazing memory may help you recall those happy memories in the future when that same song comes on the radio one day.
When I was in middle school, I was a huge fan of punk rock and rap. Not only that, but I also played the guitar, so I was invested in the music I was listening to. In high school, I started to enjoy more old school rap and metal. And now, as a university student, my favourite genre is the exact same genre I critiqued so harshly whenever my friends would listen to it: new age rap — otherwise known as “trap music.”
Something about it is just fun. The lyrics are usually garbage and don’t mean anything, but the flow mixed with the beats just sounds good to my ears. I’ve gone as far as to even listen to trap music from many different countries, such as: England, Italy, China, Korea, Germany, and the United States. It just sounds good.
Now that I’ve established the beauty behind music, I thought I would use Audacity to make my own trap beat in order to pay some (terrible) homage to the genre.
Installing Audacity was easy — a simple .exe which guided me through the install process. It even provided me with links to a quick help guide, a manual, a forum, and a wiki to learn more about the software.
The Creative Process
Making a beat was difficult (more on this in my review of the software).
First, I went online and searched for some royalty free samples to snip pieces from to include in my track. I got the samples from wavy.audio. After that, I listened to a bunch of samples in Audacity, cut bits and pieces out of samples that I enjoyed, and mashed together a track.
Sharing your track through some sort of Audacity link is impossible, so I uploaded the track to SoundCloud. Take a listen here. Not bad for my first time.
Who am I kidding. It sounds terrible. And part of it is because of Audacity.
Time for the Review
The good: Audacity’s ownership and licensing is as open source as it gets and you can see it in detail here. You can use it for commercial, personal, institutional, or educational purpose, and you can distribute, copy, modify and/or resell it under certain terms. That’s a plus!
The bad: The main problem that I have with Audacity compared to other software such as GarageBand or Reaper is that you cannot make your own beats without importing a beat. You’re limited to downloading beats or making your own and importing them into Audacity. Compared to GarageBand or Reaper who have both of these functionalities combined, Audacity only has the producing part implemented — not the creating of the track. And I’m using implemented loosely.
It’s amazingly clunky to use the UI. I cannot continually paste the same beat over and over without slightly moving the cursor, causing my beats to be constantly off time. I was so frustrated with this I decided to just leave it off time because of how horribly annoying it was.
On top of that, zooming into beats for some reason has it’s own button, meaning if I needed to zoom in and clip a beat, I would have to click on the zoom in button, left click to zoom in multiple times, click on the snipping tool, snip the beat, copy and paste it, click on the move clip button, drag to move the clip, click on the zoom button, and right click to zoom back out. I’m sorry but WHAT? How is this user friendly in any way? Why not just implement a scroll wheel feature?
Because of this, I probably won’t use Audacity in the future. Even though it is open source and free (two things that I love), I just can’t find any situation that I would find it useful in. Not only can you not make beats in it, but the production of those beats are so clunky my brain hurts. I would much rather use another software which allowed me to create my own beats and produce them in the same software, instead of splitting it into two.
The Verdict
Audacity is being uninstalled as we speak.
Thanks for reading!
While you’re still here, if you like trap music, I would suggest checking out Young Lean’s new album: Stranger. It’s pretty amazing.
