Audacity is an Open Source audio application designed to be a full-featured, yet easy to use multi-track recording and editing suite. Stable version is also available.

Audacity is an Open Source audio application designed to be a full-featured, yet easy to use multi-track recording and editing suite. Stable version is also available.

Audacity can record live audio through a microphone, mixer, digitize recordings from other media, and capture streaming audio. Audacity can record, import and export, modify quality, has a ton of built-in effects, analyze capabilities, plug-ins, and just so much more we're scratching the surface.

It supports almost all of the popular audio formats out there, including WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, and FFmpeg-compatible files. Oddly enough, the one format it does not support is M4a, which is popular with Apple and iTunes. If your music library has a lot of songs you downloaded from iTunes, you're going to need to download a converter first.

Audacity offers some support within the application. It includes a quick help (local or the internet), a user manual online, a Wiki page with tips, tricks and more, and a link to their online forum.

I'm not going to claim to be an audiophile or sound engineer, far from it, but I feel Audacity is every bit as good as some professional applications.

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