Audacity - Media Software

Audacity is a free cross-platform digital audio editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is a multi-track audio editor with many features found in commercial software. Audacity was originally written, and currently maintained by Dominic Mazzoni, now a Google employee, while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. The current stable version is 1.2.6 released on November 15th, 2006 and is currently one of top 10 most popular downloads from SourceForge.net.


Pros & Cons
Pros:


•Free, open-source audio editor
•Supports multi-track editing
•Great free tool with all essential features
•Silence detection for automatically splitting up analog recordings into multiple files or tracks
•Fast. loading files, zooming, applying effects

Cons:

•Commercial programs have better features for more advanced functionality
•Multi-track functionality is limited and could be improved

More information

Features

- free, open-source
- cross-platform, with support for Windows, Mac, and Linux
- recording and playback of sound files
- multi-tracking editing
- file formats: supports WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis
- many digital effects and plugins, that can be written in Nyquist (LISP-like language)
- noise removal
- amplitude envelope
- independent speed/pitch
- normalization
- fading (in/out)
- trimming
- support up to 96 kHz sampling and 24 bit resolution
- can detect silences in audio tracks to automatically break up files into tracks recorded from vinyl records and audio tapes