Audacity just leveled up with free AI plugins powered by Intel’s OpenVINO, all running locally and no subscription required.
“The world’s most popular free open source audio editing software” – Audacity recently received a free plugin suite powered by Intel’s OpenVINO AI toolkit. Some of these can even compete with expensive paid subscription services.
This opens up a world of possibilities previously unavailable in Audacity. Features include:
- Noise suppression for music removal
- Transcription using Whisper.cpp with translation and export functionality
- Music separation
- Music generation (from text prompts) and Music Style Remix (musical style transfer)
The developers have based the features on a collection of sound specific tools built n OpenVINO. OpenVINO is an open source toolkit built for running machine learning on CPU and GPU on Intel dekstop and cloud platforms.
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The Music generation and Music Style Remix tools both use the Stable Diffusion AI model and Riffusion in particular. Not only can you use text prompts to generate new music, but with the Music Style Remix tool you can also tell Audacity to come up with new music based on a pre-existing track. You can select a portion of the audio file and tell the model to perform an action on it.
The Music Separation feature allows you to split a track into parts like vocals, individual instruments or any combination even without MPC stems.
New AI-powered features helpful for Podcasts
A couple of features from Intel’s new AI tools for Audacity can be really useful for podcasting, editing voice overs or other spoken-word applications. Take for example the Noise Suppression plugin which makes it easy to get rid of unwanted background noise. Or the Transcription feature that can automatically transcribe and translate voice overs and output them to a label track.
In line with the open-source ethics of the software, the new AI features run locally on your PC, so your audio isn’t uploaded to some server on the other side of the world. “This is just the first step. We hope to continue partnering with Intel to develop all kinds of new AI tools in the future,” says Martin Keary, Product Owner at Audacity.
The only downside is that the new AI features are only available on Windows as of now. We hope Audacity eventually comes up with Mac and Linux versions as well.
Click here to download Audacity now!
