Audacity: The bravest audio editor around.

It's a sad life, living off Window's Sound Recorder. Enter Audacity. Audacity is an open source, cross platform audio editor.

It's hard to capture this program in one blog post, but let me just say: it's terrific. If you want to cut a track for ringtones, Audacity can do it. If you want to cut the first 5 seconds out of that song for your iPod, Audacity can do it. You can generate tones, silence, static, and a ton of other things. It has a ton of effects:

• Amplify: Either increase or decrease the sound of a song. Allows you to check a "Allow Clipping" box if you don't want any distortion at all.
• Normalize: Amplifies (positively) all of the tracks, but does not allow clipping.
• Delay: A more advanced Echo. Check the description in the program (or ask in a comment) if you want to know more.
  
• Echo: Very simple Echo.
• Compressor: basic compressor
  
• Leveler: I haven't a clue.
• Auto duck: No clue.
• Bass Boost: Boosts the bass!
• Low pass filter: Complicated...I dunno
• Equalization: EQ the track.
• High pass filter: See Low pass filter.
• Phaser: Dunno.
• Tremelo: Wha?
• Wah Wah: Creates something like a wah wah pedal on a guitar...
• Change Pitch: Changes only the sound. Like taking in helium.
  
• Change Speed: Changes both Pitch and Tempo. Like playing a record player very fast.
  
• Change Tempo: Changes only the tempo. As in, witha metronome, upping the beats per minute. This means the sound is the same pitch.
  
• Vocoder: Codes the vo? I dunno.
• Cross Fade In/Fade Out: ???
  
• Click Removal: ???
  
• Clip Fix: ???
  
• Noise Removal: ???
  
• Repair: ???
  
• Fade In/Fade out: Very nicely fades in or out your selection.
• Invert: ???
• Normalize: ???
• Vocal Remover:

And even more. As you can see, I am not the most audio knowledgable person on the earth. HOWEVER, maybe you are! If you have a good, simple explanation (or correction) to any of the effects above, send an e-mail to freewarewire@gmail.com, and I'll totally give you credit!

Anyway, I feel really stupid not knowing many of those things. But there's even more good things about it:

• Project saving: If you want to save something, channels and all, you can save it as an AUP file, so you can open it back up and edit it, just as you left it. KEEP IN MIND, Audacity projects are HUGE compared to even a WAV of that project. In addition to the project file (example: project.aup), there is a folder created that contains the project files (example project_files).
  
• Metadata editing: Yes, you can open a file, edit the metadata, and export it again.
• MIDI viewer: You can do "File>Import>MIDI."
• Export/Export selection: This is key. In Audacity, "Save" is for Audacity projects. "Export" is for exporting to an mp3, a WAV, and....
• FFMPEG support: Finally! This is only in the latest Beta, but Audacity can finally import and export m4as, and other things that use FFMPEG. Just download a library, just like LAME MP3. Visit this site for more info.
  
• Portable: Heck. Yes. PortableApps has made a portable version. Edit audio on the way.
  

A few bad things.

• No MIDI editor: You can open and view them, but no editor.

That's all for now. Again, this program is very vast, and if you have anything you'd like to ammend to this post, send it in an e-mail (NOT in the comments, unless it's like 1 or 2 sentences) and I will give you credit.

Visit Audacity website for Download