Our favorite free audio editor finally gets AI capabilities thanks to Intel — Audacity gets OpenVINO as it eyes next step for Audio.com and its own DAW capabilities
Intel’s free plugins bring AI editing to Windows users
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Massively popularaudio editing toolAudacity is getting a major upgrade thanks toIntel.
The tech giant has developed a suite of OpenVINO plugins for Audacity, bringing a number of AI-powered editing features to the software.
These AI plugins, which run entirely on your PC, include noise suppression and transcription for spoken word content, and generation and separation plugins for music.
Windows only… for now
The noise suppression feature functions similarly toAudacity’s own built-in Noise Removal effect, suppressing background noise for a clearer sound. The transcription tool, powered by Whisper.cpp, can transcribe and translate words, outputting to a label track. Users can export these transcriptions through the software’s export feature.
For music, the AI tools offer music generation and remixing capabilities using Stable Diffusion. The music separation feature can split a song into its vocal and instrumental parts, or into vocals, drums, bass, and a combined “anything else” part. This is ideal for creating covers and playalongs.
These OpenVINO plugins are available fordownloadnow, but currently only for Windows. It’s possible Linux and macOS users will get access to the plugins in a future release.
In addition to these enhancements, Audio.com is eyeing the next step in its development. The company is building a creator-first platform and plans to include a cloud-saving feature that allows creators to work on Audacity projects saved directly to the cloud. This feature provides a convenient way to share projects, get instant feedback, and collaborate with others.
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Audio.com expects to launch a beta release of this feature very soon. While many Audio.com features will remain free, the new cloud storage feature will come at a small cost after the first five projects, to cover additional expenses incurred by the team. Audacity itself will remain 100% free and open source.
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Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.
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