How do I immediately record a voice in mp3 or wav to an audio track by pressing the Record Audio button, which is located on the Timeline? When you press the record audio button, you record in opus format, and I would like to write in mp3 or wav right away. There is nothing on this topic on the Internet. How to record via open other… I understand, but I want to record immediately on timeline in all the specified formats.
There are no user options for the Timeline > Record Audio function. You need to change the code and compile it yourself if you want that. You can also use something else to record audio in the format of your choice.
1 Like
Personally, I would suggest using a dedicated audio editor or DAW (digital audio workstation) for audio. For the former, I would suggest Audacity. For the latter, I would suggest Ardour. Both are excellent tools and FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software), like Shotcut 
To get into the nitty-gritty, Audacity does destructive editing (once you apply effects, the waveform of the audio is changed permanently) [edit: I haven’t used Audacity in a while and in their FAQ it says it can now do some nondestructive editing, so YMMV], whereas Ardour does non-destructive editing. So in the latter, you can play with equalizer plugins, pitch shifters, etc as dynamic effects. Once you like how the recording sounds (in either case), you can export to a file - I would suggest 24-bit FLAC or WAV at 48 kHz.
You also probably want to use lossless formats in all intermediate steps (so something like FLAC, ALAC, or WAV for audio) so that you get the best quality you can out of the final video. Otherwise, you compress once when exporting from the audio editor and once more when exporting from Shotcut — you potentially lose information (or introduce artifacts) twice.
Then again, I guess it depends on what you’re recording for. I’m doing music, so obviously the audio is pretty important. Even with just a simple voiceover or narration, though, I’d still want the best possible audio going into Shotcut, and you might still want to stick a simple equalizer on there.
Basically, use the right tool for the right job. You probably want to store intermediate files in case you go back and decide you want to EQ it differently or rerecord just a part of it or whatever. And while you can do some of that in Shotcut, I’d definitely suggest using a dedicated tool for the audio portion - there is just way more control and dedicated tools give you more options to control the output.
1 Like
Specialized programs are good and I have them, but I would like to be able to select mp3, wav or opus in my favorite Shotcut next to the record audio button - this would be a cool feature, click and write once on tmeline without compression, click again and the recording stops. I don’t think I’ll understand the source code, hopefully this feature will make it to Shotcut someday.
Honestly, one thing that would be really nice (and is probably pie-in-the-sky because of how FLOSS development works) would be tighter integration between different parts of the stack.
One thing that Adobe has going for it is that different parts of their suite seamlessly integrate with each other. Lightroom can do edits and then pass off to Photoshop for final touches in a very smooth way. Audition and Premiere Pro integrate together to provide seamless audio and video editing.
Obviously this is really hard to do in the same way when the different components of the stack are developed by completely different teams with their own ideas of how things should work. But having a workflow where we can record in Shotcut, right-click, and pass to Audacity or Ardour would be amazing. Having an option in Audacity or Ardour to “pass back to Shotcut” would be even more amazing.
Yes, it’s a pipe dream. Yes, it would be amazing
IMHO, I would not recommend a full DAW like Ardour to someone who is still learning basic audio formats. Tools at that level can be overwhelming for beginners and may hinder rather than help at first.
Ardour is open-source and free if compiled from source.
Linux users typically get it free via their distribution repositories, while Windows and macOS users usually need to purchase the official pre-built binaries… 
Okay, hear me out
I feel like by the time you start caring about the format of your audio, you’re already entering DAW territory. Beginners really don’t (usually) care about the format of their audio, whether it’s a lossy or lossless format, the bit depth etc. They might know that a recording with a standalone mic is better than with a camcorder (or at the very least, you can get cleaner audio with that), so they might pre-record or re-record the audio before/after shooting the video, but otherwise they’re not super concerned with the actual format details.
Once you start caring about the format, it’s a short hop to start caring about the bit depth, whether the levels look right (shoot, do I need a compressor here?), etc etc etc. And at that point, you’re really entering DAW territory, whether you know it or not.
I’ll give you an example from my own life, right? When I first started recording, I was using Audacity, just because it’s relatively simple. And I was doing things like pitch shifting karaoke tracks and stuff, but relatively minor edits, if any — I’d just import the karaoke track, record myself on a new track, and boom I’m done.
My frustrations started, however, when I realized I couldn’t go back and edit the pitch correction, for example, without having to undo-redo stuff. So I started looking for alternatives, stumbled on Ardour, and man it was a gamechanger.
It’s not like I’m some super-advanced user either — for the most part, I have a similar workflow to the one I had in Audacity. But now I’ve started experimenting with parametric equalizers, looking into compressors, etc etc etc — I’ve gone down the slippery slope
Yup, I know! But given that you can give as little as $1 for something that is frankly worth a helluva lot more, I honestly don’t consider that a huge issue. My wife also sings and I got her into Ardour — she’s on Windows, so she had to buy it, but she still paid way less than she would have if she bought a commercial DAW.
Also, Linux is better Easier to control background tasks or setup something minimal just for A/V production, which is nice when you care about latency or need to dedicate all of your processing power to the task at hand.
If you are open to most of your audio work in the DAW for your video project before export, you ought to take a look at our JACK integration. It is not only for Shotcut audio output; see the part about transport control. However, fair warning: this is not tested much or since a long time.
1 Like
Thanks for the tips! In our workflow, the video part of the project is usually at the very end. Usually, our process is:
- Record audio (including multiple takes, equalizing, etc) and export to finished file once we like it.
- Play it while recording the video (lipsyncing
). - Merge the two in Shotcut.
If we were doing the audio and video stuff simultaneously, then the workflow you describe would be super useful! But as it is, we might do step 1 a few days before we even do step 2, and by the time we get to step 3, we already have the finalized audio.
1 Like