Audacity has added a suite of AI-powered plugins to its renowned toolbox, according to Product Manager Martin Kiri. Audacity is the world’s most popular free open-source audio editing software used by around 100 million people worldwide and translated into 30 languages.
Keary explains Audacity’s decision to incorporate artificial intelligence: “We decided to add AI features to Audacity so that we could offer capabilities that were previously unavailable or just really difficult to achieve.”
Audacity’s new AI plugins offer capabilities that were previously too complex or costly:
✔ The transcription plugin listens to vocals or speech from an audio track and uses that to create a new text track.
✔ Music separation allows you to separate a song into individual instruments like bass, vocals and drums.
✔Audio generation allows you to create new audio using a text prompt to describe the kind of sound you’d like to hear.
✔ Even cleanup background noise with one-touch Noise Suppression.
The plugins were developed using Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit, according to Kiri: “This was all made possible using Intel’s open Veno AI toolkit. The plugins run locally on your PC rather than from a server addressing privacy and security concerns.”
Kiri shares Audacity’s future-focused vision: “We hope to continue partnering with Intel to develop all kinds of new AI tools in the future to help take audacity to a level no one’s ever seen before.”
New AI features for podcast creators
Audacity’s new tools also benefit podcasters and other creators of spoken word content. The plugins include useful features for tasks like podcasting, editing voiceovers, and working with other spoken-word audio files. The new Noise Suppression plugin makes it easy to remove unwanted background noise. Additionally, a new Transcription feature powered by Whisper.cpp can automatically transcribe and translate voiceovers, outputting them to a label track.
Audacity has a privacy-first design philosophy. The AI features run locally rather than uploading audio to remote servers. This aligns with the software’s open-source values. Martin Keary from Audacity said “This is just the first step. We hope to continue partnering with Intel to develop all kinds of new AI tools in the future.”
For now, plugin compatibility is limited to Windows. However, the team hopes to expand support to Mac and Linux in the future. Audacity will keep users updated on any progress expanding access to their upgraded creative toolkit.
With Audacity’s new plugins everyday users can realize their crazy ideas that weren’t possible before.
The updates mark an extraordinary new phase for the popular digital audio workstation. Audacity is striding confidently towards a future where everyone can unleash their creativity.
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