It was a lonely quiet night. I hadn’t slept for 20 hours. My coffee was depleted and my energy even more so.

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Despite this, I had just spent the last 3 hours of my life searching for an audio editor that would do what I needed. I had over twenty different pieces of software that had audio editing capabilities. Yet none of them could perform the simple task that I wanted to carry out. Eventually I found an application that did exactly what I wanted with minimal effort. To be frank, I was ecstatic.

That event inspired me to try out every free audio editor out there and compile this list. If you are thinking about, and you want to start looking at the available free audio editing software out there, you are in the right place. But, if you want the quick answer, I narrowed it down to a short list of the top 3 audio editors. Find out what they are here. Contents. Which Audio Editor Do I Use? Audacity (Windows, Mac, Linux) This is the godfather of free audio editing software.

You can multi track to an extent (have more than just one stereo track e.g. A full band recording).

There are a range of effects and plugins, and it’s easy to use once you get used to it. It’s by far the most popular free audio editing software. Volume automation is easy using the envelope.

Deleting and muting sections of audio is also a breeze. Recording is easy too. Tip: Reset all the gain sliders if you want to do a / track balancing.

You might also like our post on. It does have its drawbacks though. The user interface is not particularly appealing, and there a lot of features that you’ll rarely use that clutter the tool bar. It looks a bit ancient, but it gets the job done.

This is an awesome starting point for anyone wanting a free editor. Link: ocenaudio (Windows, Mac, Linux) This new simple audio editor has a clean and colourful user interface. It’s so easy to use! It’s fast and it’s lightweight compared to Audacity.

It’s bundled with loads of effects (including compression, EQ and ) that you can apply and tweak in real-time. This is a huge benefit as most free editors are destructive (they record effects straight to the audio) so you have to rely on a ‘preview’ button. This is how Audactiy works, for example. But in ocenaudio you can play with the parameters of the effect and hear the changes instantly. The editor has VST support so you can use your own plugins.

It’s easy to record audio straight in to the software as well. There are lots of useful tools (such as a spectogram) for the more advanced user. One downside of this software is that it only supports single stereo/mono files.

You can’t have a multi-track session and record several instruments in your home studio and mix them. More on recording voice. But for editing stereo music files, or mono audio files (such as a voice recording) this is awesome. It’s also relatively simple in terms of features compared to Audacity, although they aren’t trying to compete on that front. Link: Hya-Wave (Chrome) This is a member of the new wave of online audio editors that run in your internet browser. And it’s my favourite of that bunch. Released in January 2015, I only discovered this a few months ago.

The interface is clean and user friendly and the learning curve is pretty much non-existent. Three cheers for simplicity!

It doesn’t support multi-tracking but you can copy, paste, cut, clear and crop your audio. You can load and save in the cloud, apply live effects and share to social media or via URL (take a listen to a song I applied some compression and a high-pass filter to here: ) Browser based DAWs could be the future of audio editing. There are several out there for music composition already and now more audio editors are appearing too. This is ideal if you are recording or editing on the fly and don’t want to install large programme on to your laptop. Link: WavePad (Windows, Mac, iPad, Android) A slightly older DAW, but still highly useful. The interface may not be as sleek as some of the editors listed here, but it makes up for this in features. It’s easy to install and easy to use.

There are lots of bundled effects including noise removal, compression and reverb. There are also some great analysis tools for more advanced users. Pitch and speed changes are possible. So is audio scrubbing, which can be very handy. It doesn’t support multi-tracking so you can only edit stereo or mono audio files.

My absolute favourite feature of this software is the batch processing (which I discussed in the introduction). You can apply compression, reverb, EQ or any effect to a number of audio files at once. This can save you HOURS in the right situation. Link: TwistedWave (web app, Mac, iPhone) Another awesome online web application for editing sound.

Again, it can’t multi-track, but it makes up for this with usability and features. It’s easy to normnalize your audio and the effects are easy to apply. Quick tip: like a lot of audio editing software, if you delete a section of audio the rest will ‘shuffle’ back so that there aren’t any gaps. If you want to remove noise without shuffling the audio, you need to ‘mute’ or ‘silence’ the section with noise.

In TwistedWave you can do this easily by highlighting the section of audio that you want to mute and hitting ‘s’ on your keyboard! Link: Wavosaur (Windows) This one is a bit ancient.

Dinosaur Wavosaur get it?! It’s looks like the missing link in the evolutionary chain between tape cutting (prime apes) and modern (humans). Joking aside, this application may be basic, but it works.

The download is only 1.3MB. Now that is small! And it’s not that old. The latest version was released in 2013.

It’s a good piece of classic Windows software. No frilly bits, no messing about. Straight to the point. It supports VSTs but doesn’t come with any.

If you want to apply effects you’ll need your own. There are loads of great analysis tools and volume automation is easy. It’s very basic and doesn’t look great. But if you just want to get the job done without downloading a huge application, it’s perfect.

Link: Soundation (web app) This is a great online application that also functions as a multi-track DAW. This means you can have several audio tracks playing at once.

The interface is attractive. It’s easy to record. Volume and pan automation are easy to perform.

You can change the color of the tracks to keep them more organised. Time stretching is also supported and there are a range of effects and plugins. There is an awesome looping feature reminiscent of Logic Pro.

This application is geared just as much to music composition and arrangement as audio editing. Yet this may be it’s downfall when considered an audio editor – it’s features and workflow are perhaps better suited to arranging music. Link: Acoustica Basic (Windows) Easy to set up a project and start recording. It has a scrub tool which can be extremely useful! Unfortunately the basic edition does not support multi-tracking but there are some great analysis tools. This is also the only free audio editor that I have come across that comes with a convolution reverb (a special type of digital reverb you can use to semi-accurately model any room).

You have to use your own impulse files though. Link: Audio Cutter Pro (web app) If you just need to crop some tracks and add some fades, this tool is perfect. It’s simple, the interface is great and the keyboard controls are intuitive. You can also import files from Dropbox or Google Drive so it fit’s in perfectly with cloud based storage. Link: Nero Wave Editor (Windows) Another simple and free audio editor. There’s nothing particularly special about this one, but it will meet basic audio editing needs.

You can apply effects non-destructively which is pretty useful. You can also create your own presets. Link: WaveShop (Windows) WaveShop supports multi-channel audio (up to 18 outputs) which could be useful in the right situation. It also claims to be ‘bit-perfect’, so samples aren’t changed needlessly. I can’t think of any more reasons why you would want to use this over any of the other editors listed here. But it’s worth taking a look if you want a simple Windows application for basic audio editing. Link: Qtractor (Linux) A colourful and sleek UI, multi-track support and even a mixer!

This one is perfect for Linux users. Unfortunately I don’t have anything running Linux so I can’t give this a try myself. It has some great reviews though.

Link: Audio MP3 Cutter Mix Converter (Android) If you need to make edits on the move, check out this Android app. It has over 1 million downloads, 55,000 ratings and a range of features. Link: The Top 3 Editors for Musicians There are a lot of options out there. It can be overwhelming. I tried every editor on this list, and narrowed it down to the top 3.

Find out what they are here. Thanks for wonderful article. Noticed, BLUEJAY was missing from review: Nut shell: Low overhead, high performance music player: DJ, Edit, Play mp3,wav,wma,cd,midi,mod,more music files in rack style with 14 audio components + new DX-DYNAMITE Digital Effects Crossover. Developed with real DJ’s, enjoy exciting track to track fades. 10-band programmable EQ. 16 polyphonic wave players, spectrum analyzer, favorites, hotkeys, presets, options, lots of options.

Extract audio from CD too. BLUEJAY, a must have. Wavepad is an NCH product. NCH will load trojans that are extremely annoying.

They are so bad that some Anti-virus programs like Avast will identify them as malware and block their operation. Unistalling an NCH program will NOT uninstall the malware. You will have a learning curve getting rid of the leftover trojans. One annoying feature is it hijacks your default opening applications for things like photos, even tho you arent using the NCH product.

NCH are unethical and a real pain. Not recommended. It’s like none of these editors had someone thinking “What would be the best keyboard-shortcuts or mouse-options to do this with? What would be the easiest, and fastest operating user interface for this option?” Funny how nobody mentions Sonic Foundry’s Sound Forge, GoldWave or Cool Edit as historic legends in that aspect. I still use older free copies of those, they work just fine in Windows 7 x64. Especially fairly recent Sony Sound Forge has a still unmatched UI! I have tried and used them all, mostly professionally, but also for home/studio/radio work.

Sound Forge beats them all in logical thinking, and it makes the work so much more pleasant to do. I always seem to run back to Sound Forge, no matter what I try on other bulky editors with strange quirks or weird looking interfaces, SF does it faster, you can customize literally everything of it (also colors/sizes) and seems more lightweight, even though its disk-footprint definitely is not, it uses RAM way more efficiently than others.

Even Audacity does really bad in that area. You need lots of RAM for that to run smoothly. I tried to find free equals to SoundForge, but I have yet to bump into one. I luckily still have a registered copy from way back when it was cheaper. Its price-tag now is just bordering on insanity. If you want the noise reduction / noise filtering plugin, you immediately need to pay up for the Pro version at Magix, which costs around 400 USD now. Seriously, who’s going to pay such ludicrous amounts for something as basic as audio-editing?

I’d much rather have paid Sonic Foundry around 80 euros or something, and then have THEM update Sound Forge with their mindset and dedication. Ever since they sold it to SONY, it has gone downhill in many ways, especially in their pricing. As a music teacher, I have some unusual requests!! First, it needs to be ridiculously easy, almost like a toy.

Second, It would be extremely wonderful if sharing (importing/exporting/previewing) clips were easy as well. I’m thinking something like “Padlet” for audio.

Make a clip, post to a wall of clips from your classmates. Import/export clips in and out of your tool, remix, edit, etc.

Each student make his/her own song made from shared samples. Hya-wave looks promising! Any thoughts about how I might make learning en masse easier is appreciated! I experimented with two programs recommended here. I am not a PC novice but definitely I am a novice at video & audio editing. I started with something I expected to be dead simple: remove the introductory audience clapping from trumpet piece.

I also needed to eliminate this same clapping at the end of the piece. Once I got used to the principles employed to do this ( fairly intuitive but definitely not “simple”), i immediately noticed that I could not do these tasks with any precision. Moving a cursor can’t easily be done within one or two second accuracy on a 16 min track. So after multiple attempts I had a track which was almost as I wanted it. All this took well over an hour & to me looks like a fundamental weakness in the two programs tried.

Both were said to be easy to use. Many other oddities found which would make both programs not practical for the occasional user who might easily forget the step details. Bearing my experience in mind I am not impressed with the contents of the reviews here which look as though they are copied from the marketing department. I am sorry to say that you totally missed the point with Wavosaur and here is why: Your November 2017 updated article doesn’t mention that Wavosaur was updated to version 1.3 in 2017 and now works flawlessly in 32 bit AND 64 bit.

Wavosaur has more tools and helpful calculators than most of the other editors (among which I use audacity and Ocenaudio for different matters). It has many decent though minimal real time and offline monitoring visualization and statistic rendering and gets the job done. Last but not least, it loads up to 255 VSTs in Rack as FX-chains (with re-ordering, mute/solo function) open/save FXB/FXP which is a HUGE advantage for flexibility. It allows any kind of non destructive sound design and processing. None of the other free editors can beat this one on this aspect of edition I believe. It makes mastering tasks a breeze and super fast. Its biggest drawbacks is that it doesn’t edit metadata and doesn’t import as many format such as flac.

Still, Wavosaur is some kind of Soundforge made free. You really can’t go wrong with this one.

PS: There is no free versions of Acoustica since version 7, which IMO makes Wavosaur it’s direct replacer. Hello, Thanks for the great list!

A question though to you, if I may: I have multiple recordings of a single conference at different locations according to the speakers. Of course if they all used the microphone there won’t be any issues however, that was not the case. With that being said, would there be an optimal software where I would upload all the audio files in multi tracks and with a single function would enable me to have a single final audio file where the software would only take the clearest pitches of each sound file?

In other words, say speaker A would speak in Audio File A. It’s not that Speaker A would be speaking all the time during the Conference. Would there be an existing software or function where the software would automatically crop the high pitches, the actual speaking voices and edit/crop them into a single file? I’ve been struggling with this problem for quite some time and for ever similar occasion had to simply resort to manual options where it would take me nights after nights for the editing. And the backside would be that there would eventually be some howling esp on the latter part of the file. So, if you could help or give me any kind of advice, that would be mostly appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance! I’ve been using Audio Cleaning Lab by Magix for a number of years.

I’ve used several versions of it, and use it to edit and clean up recordings of sermons for our church. Recently I’ve also started to add music/speaking introductions and conclusions to the sermons, as well. After using it as much as I have, I am very comfortable making edits. It has some limitations, in that it will only work with two stereo tracks and only record one source at a time (mono/stereo).

The nice features include the ability to cut out individual pops/clicks down to fractions of a second, fading in/out of the multiple tracks included in a recording, normalizing volume (selectable), expandable timeline to facilitate accurate edits, multiple built-in cleaning filters (completely adjustable), and a free downloadable 30-day unrestricted demo that becomes the full version upon purchase of the license/registration. I need to record four tracks simultaneously using the Behringer UMC404HD. I was assured by several dealers before buying it that this would work but it doesn’t. Audacity says this is because the (program) needed (maybe ASIO) needs to be paid for. This implies to me that NO free recording programs can record more than two track at a time. This seems a basic requirement but it is rarely mentioned in articles, reviews, and ads. It’s rarely mentioned in regards to budget-priced programs either.

Even expensive programs do not provide a list of the digital interfaces they will recognize. I’m pretty puzzled by this. Not quite Terry.

The reason Audacity doesn’t have ASIO support built-in is not because it’s free but because it’s open source. Including ASIO as it stands would violate either the GNU license rules or Steinberg’s license – a bit of a catch-22. You can get Audacity with ASIO if you compile it yourself and add in the ASIO plug-in and promise not to distribute it to anyone else. Compiling Audacity from scratch is, it seems to me, not something to be taken lightly. So, free doesn’t mean no ASIO. I’ve found a mixer/editor called MixPad by NCH which purports to support ASIO and multi-track recording and editing.

First though I need a decent audio interface to connect to it. Hi, I’ve been trying out a few of these free DAWs, using my laptop with windows 8.1 and my focusrite 18i20 and I haven’t had much luck with anything free thus far. Studio one was a big disappointment because you go through the trouble of signing up, installing it and setting it up and then after a while you realize that it limits you to two tracks. There’s just stuff like that. The best thing to do is just buy the full version Reaper.

It runs on anything–mac, pc, linux–and it’s very smooth and runs on my systems. Where as protools and cubase are huge hogs on your system and bug you endlessly with registration related stuff. I can’t stand protools especially. Honestly I’m thinking of going to logic pro, after many years of messing around with windows apps. Your are wrong about Studio One limiting you to 2 tracks. It’s unlimited even in the free Prime version and as of version 3.52 the Arranger track is now included in this free version.

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Here’s a short summery. Studio One Prime Highlights “Studio One Prime does not time out, feature a nag screen, or limit the number of songs you can create. Record and mix with no limit on the number of simultaneous tracks, plug-in inserts, or virtual instruments. Create songs quickly with Studio One’s fast drag and drop workflow, and newly enhanced browser for accessing backing tracks, plug-ins and more. Get inspiring sounds with the new Presence XT sampler featuring a rich 1.5 GB sampler library. Sweeten your mix with nine PreSonus Native Effects™ audio plug-ins that cover all the bases.

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Access the power of a real DAW with real-time time stretching, resampling, and normalization; single and multitrack comping; multitrack track transform (advanced freezing), and Control Link controller mapping. Expand Studio One Prime with more Presence XT libraries and professional loop content, purchasable directly from within the Studio One browser. I loved your article and I was wondering if you could help save all these hours that I am spending looking for an online solution. I would like to stream but my voice (45 yrs old) is not great. I would like to make my voice more attractive to the audience. I am looking for a real time voice editor/changer as I hate the way my voice sounds. The Voice changers that I have downloaded make my voice sound so fake and in order to try a product I am prompt to buy it.

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I dont mind spending money on buying a product as long as I know that it will work in real time streaming and the result wont sound fake or like Im an Alien/Robot. I would really owe you a huge favour if you could please please help me.