Audacity still is the one and only tool to get started in podcasting or recording. Audacity is a powerful, free, open-source audio editor that’s been around now for more than 20 years! Audacity is great for recording, assembling, and converting. Audacity works with audio up to 32-bit/384kHz with built-in dithering. It is very intuitive to import audio, to mix and combine tracks in mono and stereo, to do multitrack recording and produce a shareable output in mp3 or other popular audio formats. Sound editing can be done to sample level. Audio analysis (for example microphone frequency response) can be done on spectrogram. One word of caution, editing in Audacity is not non-destructive, so it may take a few curses and a while for experienced nonlinear editors to discover how to handle audio editing with this tool. Audacity is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux with really minimal system requirements. There are a few nice features that are not so well known, for example a timed delay to begin recording or start recording when sensing sound at the input. Recording can be done in either 16-bit or 24-bit audio and Audacity furthermore converts and combines audio clips at all rates and formats. Finally, Audacity offers a great number of good quality effects such as bass and treble, high-pass and low-pass filters and preset EQ curves, compressor, and limiter. For the beginner podcaster, the auto-duck function is super handy to add voiceovers over an existing audio or music track. Finally, Audacity has a fairly basic but effective mixer. Audacity remains after all these years a powerful, free, open-source audio editor for almost all audio work. Free on Audacity.
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