Audio editing and mixing are interesting things. From making ringtones to recording voice-overs, it has so many different forms. But you can make it even more interesting if you have good audio editing software. If you want to edit an audio clip or want to record and then modify your voice, you need to have a nice audio editing tool. There are many paid and free tools available for these audio-related tasks. Not all people can afford paid tools. So, there are several free tools to try. In this post, we are listing a few free and open-source tools that offer paid tools like features. With these tools, you can edit audio, mix multiple tracks, edit duration, apply sound effects, and much more.
I personally use the Audacity that I listed at the top place on the list. I use it to record voice-overs for my YouTube videos. You can check my YouTube channel and subscribe if you find it interesting.
Best Free Audio Editing tools
Here is the list of the best free audio editing software. You can use any of these software to record and edit audio clips.
1. Audacity
Audacity is a free audio editor tool with a professional level of features. It offers multitrack editing, live recording, and so many sound effects. This tool can easily remove noise, improve the sound, and control echo. This nice tool can also remove background noise. It supports most of the popular audio formats for editing.
If you are looking for easy-to-use but powerful sound editors, you can try Audacity. This tool is completely free. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. This tool is in active development and gets new features and improvements regularly.
2. GarageBand
If you own a MacBook, GarageBand is the best audio editing software. It is free for macOS and lets you record and edit audio. GarageBand is also the best free audio editing software for macOS. This software is good for making music or recording a podcast. You can perform several edits to the recording by using different tools available in this software. The software lets you make musical projects from scratch. There are several audio effects and beat makers to try. It also has a database of royalty-free loops for your music projects. By using plugins, you can add more features to make your music recording even better.
3. Wavosaur
Wavosaur is another free audio editor that offers a minimalistic music-mixing environment. With this tool, you can perform several editing things on soundtracks. It offers cut, copy and paste, various processing ways, the ability to add different sound effects, and mix sounds. It also comes with multi-channel audio editing support. It also has ASIO support, Real-time resampling, support for different sound formats, and more.
Wavosaur is a free tool but only comes for the Windows platform.
4. Ardour
Ardour is another free software for audio editing. It offers to edit and mix audio files with several sound effects. You can import video and then extract audio, display the audio frame-by-frame, mix, and a lot more things. It also got an option to record your audio and then use it for editing. You can cut, move, stretch, copy, paste, delete, trim transpose, quantize, swing, and crossfade part of a clip.
There are several plugins that also help you to get more features to work with.
5. Ocenaudio
Ocenaudio is a simple audio editing with a clean interface. It is easy to use and lightweight. It comes with lots of effects to work in real-time. It works similar to other audio editors but does not put too much load on the system. It also has VST support, so you can also use plugins with this software.
The downside of this tool is that you cannot have multi-track sessions and record several instruments to mix. But it is good for editing stereo music files, or mono audio files. This is the reason I am putting it in third place.
6. WavePad
WavePad is also a useful audio editing software you can try. It comes with bundled sound effects, noise removal, compression, and other tools to improve sound. It also does not support multi-track editing, but you can perform several things on the stereo or mono audio files. You can also perform batch processing to a number of files at once.
7. Power Sound Editor
Power Sound Editor Free is a nice tool that helps you record a new audio file and edit it. You can perform several editing operations including copy, paste, mix, and more. You can also apply different effects including Amplify, Delay, Equalizer, Fade, and more. This tool supports major audio formats.
It is a 100% free tool and comes for the Windows platform.
8. Music Editor Free
It can record audio, perform editing operations such as cut, copy, paste, delete, insert, silence, trim, and more, and apply several effects such as amplify, normalize, equalizer, envelope, reverb, echo, reverse, sample rate conversion, and more.
This tool helps you to edit, edit and share audio clips quickly. It runs on all available versions of Windows. The tool is free and you can download it without needing to create an account.
9. Audiotool
Audiotool is an online platform that lets you create music and edit audio for free. It is a browser-based tool, so you do not need to install anything. For quick usage, the tool is available as a Google Chrome plugin. For using this tool, you need to signup first but creating an account is free.
This is an online tool, so it can be used on any platform including Windows, Mac, Linux, and others.
10. Nero Wave Editor
Nero Wave Editor is also a free audio editing tool that brings all the basic audio editing options. You can record an audio clip, add effects, change pitch, and more. You can also create your own presets. It also offers Sample format conversion, anti-aliasing filters, dithering, and noise shaping. This is also a free tool but is available only for the Windows platform.
11. Qtractor
If you run a Linux platform, Qtractor is a good option for you. Qtractor comes with a sleek UI and has good features. It supports a mixer, multi-track editing, monitor controls, and more features. This tool supports several audio formats such as OGG, MP3, WAV, FLAC, AIFF and many more.
Qtractor is free and open-source software. So, you can download it for free and start using it.
Final Words
These are not the only audio editors or sound editors, but you will surely get a good sound editing experience. I personally recommend Audacity. I use it for editing audio for my YouTube videos. You can try that and start learning how to apply different effects. Audacity offers a pro-level of editing for free. If you want to try others, you can look at other audio editing software added in this article.
If you use any other tool that should be on this list, do not forget to share the name with us. If you find this article, you can share it on different social media platforms and help us grow. We have lots of interesting articles. Do not miss those.
