You may click and drag a single sample or you can draw along while Audacity rearranges the flow according to the described path. Unless you know what you're doing this tool is best left alone, although there might be instances where edits are required. For example, a clear sound distortion can be detected as a spike and be muted by sliding it down to its place. So essentially Draw can be used as an audio healing brush. Splitting a long album into individual tracks is also very straightforward. Audacity allows you to export selections and save them into a variety of formats including MP3, Apple AIFF, FLAC and Atrac formats. When exporting you are prompted to fill in an ID tag (file metadata) which is especially useful for organizing album tracks. To make it easier, it allows you to save and load tag templates, so you'd only need to write in specific information to each track while the artist, album, year and other data will be automatically filled in. When there is a lot of repetitive work, Chains can be used to automate some of it. Nik Collection, a group of Adobe Photoshop plugins, was originally launched by Nik Software but in September 2012 it was acquired by Google. At the time this was largely thought to be to enable Google to get hold of Snapseed, an excellent mobile image editing app. Nik Collection continued to be popular, possibly helped by the fact that in early 2016, Google made it free to download. However, in Spring 2017, Google confirmed that it wouldn’t develop the software any further. Thankfully, in October 2017, DxO, the developer of the widely respected optical correction software now called PhotoLab, announced that it had bought Nik Collection from Google.
There then followed a period of stabilisation during which DxO worked on correcting all the compatibility issues and glitches that had arisen during Google’s tenure. More recently, however, DxO has switched to developing Nik Collection further and the latest version, Nik Collection 4 was launched on 2nd June 2021. Nik Collection 5 is a group of 8 plug-in software packages for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and DxO PhotoLab (formerly DxO Optics Pro). These packages enable a range of effects to be applied quickly and easily to images, they include Silver Efex Pro, Analog Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Dfine, HDR Efex Pro, Sharpener Pro, Viveza and Perspective Efex.