Best Free Audio Editing Software

When I first started experimenting with home recording, the tech available was both expensive and, well, not very good. Obviously, like most things you can buy, there were setups to suit all budgets but in honesty, unless one could afford studio or near studio quality equipment, the resulting recordings were always a little (or a lot) substandard. I consider the "home" four track analogue recording device to be the original "Purpose Built Disappointment Machine". That was a long time ago and things have changed, and for this I am thankful. :)

These days one can achieve amazing results with relatively cheap equipment, and for those wishing to discover the world of sound recording and editing, if you're reading this review there's a reasonably good chance you already have mostly everything you need as far as hardware goes, and once you have selected one of the applications reviewed here you should have everything you need to get started. That said, it depends on what it is you are hoping to record and how good you want that recording to sound, but that's another topic for another day.

What I will say is any one of these apps will allow you to record (or import) and then edit mostly anything local to your computer, and with the correct hardware, anything at all, and any of these apps will give a true representation of what you have recorded. Whatever audio it is you hope to record, one of these apps should suit you unless you are hoping to use more than sixteen tracks simultaneously, in which case you might need to spend some cash. Commercial alternatives for multi-track recording and editing apps are not cheap by and large, and in my experience if you are going to spend your cash on commercial wares of this type, it's best to spend a lot rather than a little, but that's just my view, and that's not why we're here after all. :)

Where to start with Audacity....hmm.....from the first time i ever used it this application has been part of my essential toolkit. As far as single track editing goes, there is very little that cannot be achieved with Audacity, and achieved easily and cleanly. As far as physical drive space goes, Audicity is a small installation, but an immensely powerful one. Really though, track editing is just the tip of the iceberg with this application: it's functionality for editing is balanced with it's equally powerful functionality for recording, and also applying effects and modifications to existing audio tracks.

With Audacity you can record tracks in either mono or stereo using as sample rate of up to 96000 Hz, and up to 32bit floating point sample format, depending on your hardware. The process of recording a track (either from an internal or external source) could not be more simple once you have configured your devices, and one of the (many) neat things i really like about this application is right there in front of you: it's a little slide control that allows you to adjust the input volume of whatever it is you are recording without having to go back into the config panel. Audacity is also capable of multi-track recording, but this also is dependent on your hardware. To be honest, Audacity wouldn't be my first choice for multi-tracking, but it can do the job if required.

When you have your audio track, whether you are recording a new track or simply importing an existing track, there are virtually no limits to what you can then do by way of editing and manipulating that track, from a simple EQ tweak or fade in or out, right through to applying the most exotic VST based effect you can find, and it's so easy, and if you're not happy with the result simply CTRL+Z (undo) and your track is restored to how it was: Audacity has unlimited undo capability. You also have the facility to cut,copy and paste, which is useful and can save time. Another cool feature of Audacity is the spectrogram view, for spectrum alalysis. Audacity does come equipped with a fairly comprehensive list of effects but VST plugins are supported: to use VST plugins you will need to download and install the Audacity VST Enabler, for which i will provide a link. Also supported are LADSPA plugins.

Supported file types are: Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.

To sum up, Audacity is as simple or as complex as you want it to be, but either way it is excellent freeware and one that i wouldn't be without.
Audacity VST Enabler
 

Kristal Audio Engine is a powerful multi-track recorder, audio sequencer and mixer - ideal for anyone who  wants to get started with recording, mixing and mastering digital audio. According to their website, "It is designed as a modular system. The main application provides a mixing console, while the audio sequencer, live audio input and so on are loaded as separate Plug-Ins". It supports an ASIO audio driver, which may be appealing to those who are concerned with latency during multi-track recording. It's based on a 32-bit floating-point audio engine that can handle sample rates of 44 to 192 kHz with word sizes of 16, 24 or 32 bits. It comes with a three-band parametric EQ and supports WAVE, AIFF, FLAC, and OGG Vorbis file formats. It can only handle a maximum of 16 audio tracks, though the web site mentions an upcoming version 2 that will handle more tracks and provide support for MIDI, virtual instruments, and a wider range of VST plugins. Like all media-editing programs, Kristal requires a modern fast PC. Don't even think about using it with a sub-1Ghz machine.

Wavosaur weighs in at a total uncompressed filesize of 491K and is the only product in this review that requires no installation, which makes it extremely portable. What surprised me about it was that, for such a small program, Wavosaur packs a lot of advanced features, including resample, bit-depth convert (8,16,24,32 bits), pitch shift, vocal removal, DC offset removal, auto-trim, silence remover, interpolate, auto detect region, crossfade loop, and export of multiple .wav files from regions. It also supports ASIO drivers and VST plug-ins, has many analysis tools and is skinnable.

Thanks to subscribers Jay Eitelman, Rinchen Tsepal, and Brandon Tanner for contributing to this review.

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This software category is maintained by volunteer editor laupnaicul. Registered members can contact the editor with any comments or questions they might have by clicking here.

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