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.
You may also like
The promise of Hybrid Education beyond the pandemic
by Praneet Khandal, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Remember the time when education was disrupted not by new technology but by a global pandemic? It was, however, these new technologies that helped us get back to...
13 hours ago
4 min read
Podcasting Pedagogy: The missing piece in Higher Education podcasting
by Jonathan B. Singer, Loyola University Chicago, USA and Mim Fox, University of Wollongong, Australia.We know the social work classroom is changing. Students are balancing jobs, caregiving, and field placements, often...
1 week ago
5 min read
Educational media that works: Report from the M&L25 conference
by Zac Woolfitt, Inholland University, The Netherlands. This article on the Media and Learning conference in Leuven 18-19th June 2025 provides a detailed description of many of the highlights from this year’s...
1 week ago
21 min read