Episode: 1947
Title: HPR1947: ocenaudio 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1947/hpr1947.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:40:55

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This is HPR Episode 1947 entitled OsoDio, it is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 12 minutes long.
The summary is OsoDio in a crock platform, easy to use, fast and functional audio editor.
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Hello, this is Lost in Brunks, also known as David Collins Rivera.
Today, I'd like to talk about the audio editing application OsoDio, that's O-C-E-N-A-U-D-I-O, all one word.
If you haven't heard of it before, it is a piece of software that's been described by some as being similar in style and functionality to twisted wave for iOS.
It is, however, cross-platform, with binaries available for Linux, Slash Unix, Windows and Mac, in both 32 and 64-bit versions, and running on the QT framework.
I'm not familiar with twisted wave myself, so I'll have to take that assessment on faith.
I am, however, familiar with OsoDio as I've been using it now for about a year.
And in that time, it has become my go-to software for certain audio editing jobs.
OsoDio is the product of a group of audio and software engineers from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.
It is available from several sources online, but the website for the project, where you can grab any version of it, is at www.osinaudio.com.br.
A disclaimer here.
I don't use my computer to record audio.
If you follow my HPR series Theatre of the Imagination, you'll have heard me describe different aspects of my process in tedious detail.
I use a dedicated portable recording device.
I then transfer the recorded file to my computer and use audio editing software to wait for it, edit the audio.
It is precisely at this stage where OsoDio comes in, again, for certain kinds of projects.
Use the right tool for the job and all that.
I'll explain what I mean in a minute, but please understand that I have not recorded audio directly into this application and cannot comment about that part of its capability.
Now, in the FOSS world, free, open-source software, Audacity tends to be the first audio editor that most people think of if they aren't looking for a full-blown digital audio workstation.
Audacity is venerable, capable, cross-platform, multi-track, and very well-known.
It's also burdened with a strange interface and can be extremely unstable from release to release.
OsoDio has been designed to be a single-track editor that is to say you cannot play multiple tracks on it at one time unless you merge them together, which OsoDio has functionality for.
Maybe somebody can make active use of that to efficiently produce a multi-track song or other audio project, but I can't.
The merging functionality seems best for inserting small clips or sounds into a very localized region, but there's no way to hear multiple tracks running at the same time without making that commitment.
This may seem to imply that OsoDio is somehow weak compared to Audacity, but again, they are different tools designed for different jobs.
A wrench is not a pair of pliers even if you can sometimes do the same work with them.
Now, I'm into audio drama that is to say audio plays with multiple characters talking to each other.
Production-wise, each of these characters tends to be on a separate track all their own.
That is not an easy thing to edit with OsoDio if it can be done at all, but the application doesn't get points off, because as I say, it was never designed to do multi-track production.
I still stick with Audacity for that. Audacity doesn't really have a multi-track peer for doing what I call cutting audio.
That is to say chopping up long audio tracks into tiny bite-sized chunks and swapping them around quickly and easily to make a clean, coherent, final product.
OsoDio can do that, but only one track at a time.
So it's bad for audio drama, but it's good, even great, for single-track projects such as podcasts like this.
And spoiler, yes, I edited this episode on OsoDio. Bet you didn't see that coming.
I am also a writer who records his own audiobooks, which is yet another single-track type of editing project.
This past year I've recorded my short stories and will record my upcoming novel with a dedicated portable audio recording device.
But from there, the projects go directly into OsoDio for cutting and general editing.
Remember I sniped at Audacity's tendency to be a little or even a lot crashy?
Well, I could complain for hours about that, but this episode isn't about Audacity or its drawbacks.
So let's say I come by my frustration honestly and just leave it at that.
OsoDio is stable. I mean rock stable. It can handle huge audio files of a rather large number of codec types, quickly and without even blinking a digital eye.
The initial raw tracks for audiobook chapters, before editing, and for instance, can easily be hundreds of megabytes in size.
And time after time, OsoDio imports edits and saves these out without a glitch.
If you've had stability issues with audio applications before, you'll find this one to be a breath of fresh air.
For those of you committed to free and open-source software, OsoDio might or might not be for you.
It is not currently released under a recognized free software license, such as the GPL or the MIT or a BSD license.
Instead, the developers refer to it as something they mysteriously call donationware, as in they have donated it to the general public.
It is free of cost and can be used for commercial production of audio, but cannot itself be sold.
In free culture terms, something released like this could fall under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, which is well known and often used for music and other artistic works.
In software terms, there's likely an equivalent, but I'm not too up on software licensing, so I don't know what that would be called.
It would be very nice for the OsoDio developers at the Federal University of Santa Catarina to consider using an established and well-understood software license, just to avoid confusion, or the ever-present specter of the application being slapped with new legal restrictions, or even being pulled entirely, which has happened to different projects in the past.
The source code for OsoDio seems to be available for asking, since they are always looking for people to help out on the project. You can't hack on a project if you can't work with the code, right?
So no, I don't know what you'd call that.
Free software, open source software, neither?
A formal licensing scheme definitely seems overdue here, and I urge the developers of OsoDio to adopt one.
At any rate, if those things bother you, you might want to avoid using it, or drop them a line with your concerns, considering how nice the software is, I would definitely recommend the latter, because it's well worth checking out.
OsoDio can use VST audio plugins. I haven't experimented with that part of it very much, but the capability is there.
It has built-in high and low-pass filters, somewhat rudimentary, but quite usable. You can highlight a section of the waveform and apply gain effects, fade ins and outs, some basic reverb, and quite a bit more.
Speaking of waveform, it has a nice interface for manipulating the sound waveform of your file with easy zooming in and out, a nice highlighting tool, and the ability to find zero crossings.
One element of this application that I very much like, though it took some getting used to, is that it does not save your project in some kind of OsoDio-specific format, the way, say, audacity or other multi-track software solutions do.
When you save, it asks what audio format you want, with wave.wav being the default, mp3, og, and a whole bunch of others are also supported.
This means you can take an OsoDio project file and import it directly into something else, without having to worry about converting or exporting.
Really, when you save an OsoDio, you are exporting. If you want version control from save to save, just save them under different names, maybe appending o1, o2, o3, etc. to the file names.
Alternatively, you can just use the same name and overwrite the old save with the new one.
The method works however you like, resulting in clean files you can import into any other application without worry.
There's a lot more that can be said about OsoDio, but you might want to just jump in and work with it for a while.
It enjoys a fairly low learning curve and has sane default keyboard shortcuts, all of which serve to speed up production.
I like it, I use it, I recommend you try it.
This has been Lost in Bronx. Thank you for listening. Take care.
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