Audio Editors (Waveform / Multitrack)

Audio editors are simpler than DAWs — they focus on chopping, cleaning, and exporting individual files rather than full song production. Most podcasters, YouTubers, and field recordists live here, not in a DAW. For full DAWs see daws-overview. For voice / podcast specifics see podcast-voice-tools. For waveform UI in the browser see media-players (wavesurfer.js).

Free / OSS

• ★ Audacity — GPL, cross-platform. The standard free audio editor; stretches all the way back to 2000. Multitrack, plugins (LADSPA / VST / AU / Nyquist), noise reduction, export everywhere. After the 2021 Muse Group acquisition, telemetry concerns sparked a fork (Tenacity); Audacity remains the reference and is still GPL.
• ★ Tenacity — GPL, cross-platform. Audacity fork that strips telemetry / opt-in analytics. Functionally near-identical for most users; a clean choice if you want zero phone-home.
• Ocenaudio — closed source but free; cross-platform; cleaner UI than Audacity, real-time effects preview, no multitrack. Good for fast single-file edits.
• Wavosaur — free closed Win-only editor; tiny, fast.
• Sound eXchange (SoX) — GPL CLI; the swiss-army knife for batch / scripted audio processing. Pair with shell pipelines.
• ffmpeg — LGPL/GPL CLI; not strictly an editor but the universal converter / trimmer / mixer.

Spectrogram / analysis viewers

• ★ Spek — GPL, cross-platform; just opens a file and shows you the spectrogram. The fastest "is this MP3 actually lossless?" check.
• Sonic Visualiser — GPL, cross-platform; deeper analysis for musicology research.
• iZotope RX — see vocal-stem-separation — paid, but the spectrogram editor for restoration work.

Paid commercial

• Adobe Audition — Creative Cloud subscription; multitrack + Spectral Frequency Display + healing brush; the broadcast / video-post standard.
• Steinberg WaveLab — paid; mastering-focused single-file editor; the audiobook / mastering desk standard.
• Sound Forge Pro (MAGIX) — paid; long-running waveform editor.
• Reaper — covered in daws-free-oss; doubles as a multitrack audio editor with great rendering.

File / batch operations

• SoX — CLI; resample, normalize, fade, batch.
• ffmpeg — universal converter (transparent loudness norm with loudnorm filter).
• Loudgain — GPL CLI; ReplayGain 2.0 tagging for music libraries (pairs with audio-tagging-library tools like Picard / Beets).

Restoration / cleanup

• See vocal-stem-separation and podcast-voice-tools for AI-driven cleanup.
• Audacity's Noise Reduction is good enough for most podcast uses.

Pick this if…

• Default free audio editor: Audacity (or Tenacity if telemetry is a concern).
• Single-file edits, faster UI: Ocenaudio.
• Spectrogram check: Spek.
• Batch / scripting: SoX or ffmpeg.
• Broadcast / video post: Adobe Audition.
• Mastering / audiobooks: Steinberg WaveLab.