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Meeting held Meeting held May 19, 2011 at the Art Institute of Seattle

AES PNW Section Meeting Report
Audacity, A Digital Audio Workstation
with Steve Hastings
Software Engineer
DTS Inc
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Section Chair Bob Moses introduces meeting, flanked by JJ Johnston left and Steve Hastings right.
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Steve Hastings at the lectern.
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A small but interested group of 26 attended the meeting.

Audio recordings of the meeting:
96k mp3 32k mp3
Part 1 (58.4MB mp3)  
Part 2 (26.6MB mp3)  
Part 1 (20.4MB mp3)  
Part 2 (9.7MB mp3)  

Photos by Gary Louie, Audio Recording by Rick Chinn.


The PNW Section May meeting brought Steve Hastings, a software developer and engineer at the DTS Inc. Kirkland WA office, to speak about the free, open source audio editing program Audacity. The meeting was held with the cooperation of the Art Institute of Seattle's AES Student Section at their downtown Seattle campus. About 26 attended (1/2 AES members).

Steve spoke as an enthusiastic user and booster of the program, which is completely free and open source, and available for the main operating systems like Windows, Mac OSX, and GNU/Linux. Despite the price, it still performs most of the expected audio editing functions and a few novel ones, yet programmers can add or alter as they wish. It may not have some functions users may need from commercial applications, but can be useful and cost effective.

Mr. Hastings provided the road map for anyone interested, including how to download and install the software, and did several examples of typical editing functions such as analyzing a signal and performing edits and processing.

Steve also spoke about free software development and licensing/copyright issues, and discussed many questions and answers about audio editors in general as well as Audacity's feature set.

During a break, Door prizes were awarded:

  • Adobe Loopology CD sets:
    • Ken Malott
    • Christopher Deckard
  • Adobe Audition T-shirts:
    • Turner Atkins
    • Bob Moses
    • Michael Heavener
    • Nathan Hasbargen
  • THAT Corp scratchpad: Greg Mauser
  • THAT Corp VCA evaluation board: Madison Murray


Reported by Gary Louie, PNW Section Secretary

Last Modified, 7/30/2015 14:18:10 (dtl)