For audio editing, look no further than open source wonder Audacity. You can record live, convert old records and tapes to digital, cut, copy and splice files and much more. This version is updated regularly, and despite the 'beta' tag is very stable.
Interface
Whether you choose the stable or beta series, Audacity is not very attractive, and can at first look complex. However, with a little experimentation it soon becomes a very usable application.
For live sound and digitizing old media, you need to feed audio into your computer via a cable. Your audio-in, or mic should be set up by default, but otherwise can be found in Preferences. Recording is then as easy as hitting the red button on the Audacity interface.
Easy to use
What makes Audacity great in this regard is that editing recordings is really simple, not tricky like some professional apps! Using the Highlight tool you can quickly cut, copy, or add effects to parts of tracks. Make a mistake and you can undo as many steps backward as you like, meaning you can experiment knowing nothing can be broken! As you can use up to 16 channels at once, Audacity gives users lots of flexibility.
Editing MP3 and other digital files is just as easy. Drag them into Audacity to open, and then do what you like with them. Adding fade ins or outs is easy, and you can save in whatever format you like. Audacity supports ID3 tags, so you can add all the meta data you like to saved tracks. There is lots more to Audacity, and luckily it has extensive documentation available online or to download.
Conclusion
Audacity is the best free audio editing tool around. It's an incredibly useful application, whether you're recording live or just editing audio files. Despite it's unattractive interface, Audacity is an essential download.
Recent changes- Bug fixes for:
- Interface:
- Excessive delay occurred when typing into labels in long projects.
- Last digit of TimeText controls could not be manipulated in some formats.
- (Windows, OS X) Play and Record shortcuts did not work after clicking in Device Toolbar.
- (OS X, Linux) Crash occurred if Toolbars were reset during playback or recording.
- Imports and Exports:
- MP2 files were not importable without FFmpeg library or an import rule.
- Files that could only be imported using FFmpeg imported as noise with no error message if FFmpeg was not available.
- Files containing PCM audio but an incorrect extension (such as MP3) caused a freeze.
- Effects and Analysis:
- An empty command could be added to a Chain which then displayed a Nyquist error message when run.
- Plot Spectrum didn't preserve signal level if multiple tracks were analyzed.
- Other bug fixes:
- Audacity has been provisionally fixed so that it can no longer create block files longer than the sample format or project format allows, and can no longer delete these, which led to data loss. Any overlong blocks found are preserved but "orphaned", so will appear as silence.
- Orphan block files were wrongly reported if cutting or copying to the clipboard then reopening the project in the same session
- Fixed some crashes and incorrect movement of audio when dragging tracks
- (Windows) Data loss is now prevented when encountering a corrupted .aup file created in ANSI builds.
- (Linux) Restore building if USE_PORTMIXER is not defined
- Changes and Improvements
- Normalize: Faster processing and improved interface. Left-right balance in unsplit stereo tracks is now preserved by default, with a checkbox option provided to process stereo channels independently
- Spectrograms now allow window sizes up to 32768 and frequencies up to half the sample rate (the maximum possible)
- Mix and Render now preserves clip length by not rendering white space between time zero and first audio, and preserves audio before time zero. To retain silence before the audio starts, generate silence after render
- Grouped some Edit Menu items into "Remove Audio" and "Clip Boundaries"
- CleanSpeech Mode removed from Interface Preferences (it still runs if it was enabled in a previous Audacity but can only be turned off there)
- (OS X) Added support for AudioUnit MusicEffects (but no MIDI support)
- (Linux) Set the per-user files directory per the program name set in configure
- (Linux) Changed the default location of the Audacity temporary directory to be in /var/tmp not /tmp, so preserving the directory between reboots
- Support for many formats
- Lots of special effects
- Easy to learn
- Effects can be previewed, and undone easily
- Ugly interface design
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