Audacity is the most preferred free open source audio editor available for both windows, Mac and Linux. Audacity was created by Mazzoni now works at Google, but is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world. Audacity was the 6th most popular download from SourceForge.net, with 63 million downloads as of year 2009. Audacity won the SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia.
My experience with Audacity dates me back to Year 2000, when I was using Windows 1998, audacity came as a freeware and thus doesn’t provided me any annoyances for registration. Audacity is not as feature rich as Sony Sound forge or few other paid ones, but it does perform the handy editing functions. Few of the features supported by Audacity are as follows -
1. Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME encoder, downloaded separately), Ogg Vorbis, all file formats supported by libsndfile library.
2. Editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (with unlimited Undo).
3. A large array of digital effects and plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist.
4. Amplitude envelope editing.
5. Noise removal.
6. Audio spectrum analysis using the Fourier transformation algorithm.
7. Audacity can also be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts. It can be used for finishing podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out.
The latest release of Audacity is 1.3.11 (Beta) which is recommended for Windows 7 users, however if you looking to use stable version, you can download Audacity v1.2.6, released 3 years ago. For other platforms, go here.
LAME and other Plugins for audacity can be found here.
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