Online Audio Editor AudioMass

Recently I had to do some quick edits to an audio podcast file for work and I was in a bit of a pinch. I was away from my main desktop where I had Audacity installed and the laptop I had with me did not have it installed. I could have taken the time to download and install Audacity and usually I would, but for some reason instead of doing that I went searching for an online alternative to Audacity and what I found was AudioMass.

I am not a professional audio editor, and it is not usually part of my job, this is a rare occurrence when I need to edit audio. I say that so you get a sense of my level of expertise in using audio editors. Give me some code to write and edit and I am happy, editing one of the companies podcasts not the task I am best suited for but I had a list of things I had to fix in the podcast episode, mainly removing some blank spots to make the audio shorter and to remove the occasional um and ahhs. It really is incredible how often we as humans say um, but I digress.

Things that I like about AudioMass.

• This is browser based. No need to download and install anything it is all done in your browser.
• Open source. You can see the code Github repository. You can even download it and run it yourself.
• Easy to use effects that you can just apply. Although I never had to do that on my edit job but I can see how it would come in handy.
• Impressive interface for being all browser based.

Things that I dislike about AudioMass.

• There is no license posted on the Github repository. While it is open source there is no license saying what you can or cannot do with it.
• Being browser based it does seem to have a limit on file size that you can open with it.
• Can only export mp3 and wav files. This might not be a problem for most people but it is something to be aware of.

I have to say that I was pretty impressed with AudioMass overall, especially the fact that it runs completely in the browser. It helped me get my little audio editing done until the main audio editor was back and could fix and replace the file with a more polished version. I found the following video talking about AudioMass on Youtube. I’ll include it, they touch on a number of points that I do as well.