For Mac OS 9 and Mac OS 10.0 through 10.6, legacy Universal binary versions of Audacity with Intel and PPC support are still available. Download Online safety when downloading.
The market for audio-editing tools feels like a maze filled with dead-ends. The market is saturated with programs that either cost a ton of money—think, for example, of Adobe Audition—or programs that haven't been maintained in many years.
- SoundEdit was the first popular GUI-based audio editor for digitized audio. It was one of the first significant audio applications for personal computers in general. SoundEdit was known for its ease of use. It made audio manipulation accessible to those who were not musicians or audio professionals.
- It is one of the best free audio editing software for Mac and Windows. It is a professional music editor that allows you to cut, copy, paste and add effects like reduce noise, amplification in your recording.
A good audio-editing program for editing music or podcasts, recording sound, or remixing tunes features several essential tools:
- Basic audio editing
- Application of effects
- Ability to work with different audio formats
It's always best to record clean audio from the get-go, to reduce your post-processing rework. But for those times when you have no choice but to edit an audio file, we've pulled together a list of five free programs to help you edit your audio with professional flair.
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Audacity (Windows, Mac, and Linux)
What We Like
- Highly extensible.
- Works with a wide variety of formats and operating systems.
What We Don't Like
- Interface looks outdated.
- Changes to a track affect original file, so they can’t be undone.
Audacity remains one of the most popular free audio editors on the market. The program features excellent editing features, plus it ships with dozens of native plugins and the capacity to load more.
In addition to its editing capability, Audacity works as a multitrack recorder, too. This feature can be useful if you want to record live audio or convert vinyl records and cassette tapes to digital audio.
It's compatible with a wide range of audio formats, including MP3, WAV, AIFF, and OGG Vorbis.
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Wavepad Sound Editor (Windows, Mac, Android, Kindle)
What We Like
- Advanced tools such as speech synthesis, voice changer, and spectral analysis.
- Easy to use.
- Editing is non-destructive (can be reversed).
What We Don't Like
- Can be slow in rendering effects.
- Can’t record from more than one source at a time without MixPad (an additional app).
Wavepad Sound Editor is a feature-rich program that supports a good selection of file formats, including MP3, WMA, WAV, FLAC, OGG, and RealAudio.
Use Wavepad Sound Editor for reducing noise, clicks, and pops, and for adding effects like echo and reverb. The program offers spectral analysis, speech synthesis, and batch processing—and the editing process is inherently nondestructive, so your risk of corrupting the original data is reduced.
The program ships with all the familiar, basic tools for editing audio files, but it can also import VST plugins (Windows only) to extend its capabilities—but that feature is only available if you upgrade to the Master's version.
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Power Sound Editor Free (Windows)
What We Like
- Intuitive interface.
- Lots of sound effects and manipulation tools.
What We Don't Like
- Ads during setup process.
- Significant resource consumption.
This great-looking audio editor offers a lot of functionality. It features a broad set of effects—more than 25 built-in, including some rare noise-reduction tools as voice breath reduction, which is useful for cleaning up voice recordings.
Roxio Sound Editor For Mac
Power Sound Editor Free offers high-quality native recording, audio extraction from videos or YouTube streams, and support for a large number of input audio formats.
The downside to this program is that the free version only allows you to save your processed files as Wave files—but it does allow you to convert afterward. Upgrading to the deluxe version does away with this two-step process and unlocks additional features.
Wavepad Sound Editor For Mac
The installer for this program also contains extra, unrelated software. If you don't want these apps installed on your system, click the decline button for each one.
- I am too much frustrated with it.would you please provide tutorials to export in 5.1 AAC audio with neroAAC or any other other AAC encoder. It crash too much when working on 5.1 audio or 7.1.
- Excellent
- 2.3.0 don't work on new installs without fully updated had to revert back to 2.1 for windows 8.0 8.1, microsoft is playing up the 8.1, we did find the proper update to fix this on 7 it has to be-be latest .net frame 4.7.2 is there a way we can have it be used using the earlier or mingle with both 3.5 and 4.5 up version. as sometimes this frame system is an issue with some stuff, api-ms-runtime-crt dll missing from the main exe and zip file we use these on all systems as an oem provider so letting ya know. we have been using this for years I actually cut 2 albums with my vocals with this better than some auto tuner program, real musicians with real talent us it. lol someone asked why not use auto tuner lol, I'm real, not fake if I can't tune it by vocals, yea your not a real singer paigestormblade.com
- In comparison of other DAWs this is very easy to use but also offers many advanced functions. I've read some comments about not able to import/export to MP3 etc. You can, however you have to download and import the lame codec separately. This is due to copyrights. It's very easy. Go via the menubar to 'Preferences' and then find 'Libraries'. There you can download and import the needed lame codec and also FFMPEG for importing many other kind of audiofiles. (https) i.ibb.co/Pc4Zk89/Audacity-lame-FFMPEG.png You can download the codecs manually here: (https) lame.buanzo.org/#lamewindl Or you can click on the following links to download them directly for Windows: (https) lame.buanzo.org/lame_v3.100.zip (https) lame.buanzo.org/ffmpeg-win-2.2.2.zip and for MAC-OS: - (https) lame.buanzo.org/Lame_Library_v3.99.5_for_Audacity_on_macOS.zip -(https) lame.buanzo.org/ffmpeg-mac-2.2.2.zip