Thanks God there are still generous people out there exists and doing something helpful. One example: Audacity, totally free audio editor software. Invented by Dominic Mazzini in fall of 1999, Audacity now developed by dozens of volunteer coders and used by million people worldwide, thanks to its open source release under GPL (General Public License). Means you can download it, use it privately or commercial usages, write your own code, contribute to development, bug reports and fix, and even sell it for free of royalty.

Audacity is tool to record, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 files. Common audio editing tasks such as Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), Split, Delete, Silence, and Duplicate, record tracks simultaneously (depend on your soundcard/audio converter specs), mix unlimited number of recorded tracks (depend on your hardware limitation), overdub existing track in real-time (with hardware latency) and apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Echo, Change Tempo, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST (MacOS and Windows) and LADSPA (Linux) plug-in effects.

Despite the huge capability of audio editing, Audacity still usable and simple to use for ordinary people who wants playing around with their audio files. For instances, cut and/or reduce bit-rate of mp3 files to make smaller file size, combine several songs into one file, convert one audio format to another, or even make a karaoke song files from existing song lists by removing vocal track (only works with records where vocal panned center and all other instrument tracks panned out of center).

Installation process is easy on my Windows and operations is friendly without spend lots of time reading manual help or FAQ. Audacitt supports cross-platform of Unix, Linux, Windows, PC or Mac. There is also a set of friendly beginner tutorial for recording and editing digital audio included in installation files.

Internal effects built-in are: amplify, bass boost, echo, fade in/out, FFT filter, invert, noise removal, reverb, phaser, reverse and wah.

Whether you’re casual audio listeners who needed wonderful tools to manipulate your audio collection files, digital audio editing newbie who want to mess around with editing software without robbing your wallet or seasoned audio editors, Audacity is an alternative of free audio recording/editing tool compared to hundreds of dollars Steinberg Cubase, MOTU Digital Performer, Cakewalk SONAR or other giants.

Download Audacity at: http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Get free VST plug-ins for Audacity at: http://www.databaseaudio.co.uk http://www.kvr-vst.com

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