Our favorite free audio editor finally gets AI capabilities thanks to Intel – Audacity gets OpenVINO as it sees the next step for Audio.com and its own DAW capabilities
The hugely popular audio editing tool Audacity is getting a major upgrade thanks to Intel.
The tech giant has developed a range of OpenVINO plugins for Audacity, giving the software a number of AI-powered editing features.
These AI plugins, which run entirely on your PC, include noise reduction and transcription for spoken word content, and plugins for music generation and separation.
Windows only… for now
The noise cancellation feature works similarly to Audacity’s own built-in Noise Removal effect, suppressing background noise for clearer sound. The transcription tool, powered by Whisper.cpp, can transcribe and translate words and output them to a label track. Users can export these transcripts via the software’s export function.
For music, the AI tools offer music generation and remix 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 “something else” part. This is ideal for creating covers and playalongs.
These OpenVINO plugins are available for to download now, but currently only for Windows. It’s possible that Linux and macOS users will be able to access the plugins in a future release.
In addition to these improvements, Audio.com is looking at the next step in its development. The company is building a creator-first platform and plans to include a cloud-saving feature that will allow creators to work on Audacity projects stored directly in the cloud. This feature provides a convenient way to share projects, get instant feedback, and collaborate with others.
Audio.com expects to launch a beta version of this feature very soon. While many Audio.com features remain free, the new cloud storage feature will incur a small charge after the first five projects to cover the team’s additional costs. Audacity itself remains 100% free and open source.