Discovering Audacity
Philip Moore explains how to start editing audio files with Audacity

One thing most audio tools have in common is that they are usually quite expensive to buy. So it's great when you find a good quality tool, like Audacity, that's available absolutely free. It's perfect for beginners, but it also includes features that will interest more advanced users. Versions are available for Windows, Mac and Linux and we've included a copy of the Windows version on this month's cover CD.

Professional features
For a freeware program Audacity offers some pretty powerful features, including 96kHz 32-bit floating point recording and playback; a good (if rather basic) selection of built-in effects, extensive file format support and multitrack mixing capabilities. It even offers a drawing tool so you can pencil out audio glitches at the sample level. What's missing are things like real-time effects (VST and DX), or ASIO and WMD driver support. But hey, it's free, so stop complaining.

Basics
If you open the File/Preferences (Ctrl-P) you will see that the program is smart enough to let you select your recording and playback device (for those that may have more than one audio device on their system), and to record in mono or stereo, or even more channels at once if your sound device supports it and you need to. You can choose to record in the professional quality 96kHz, 24-bit or 32-bit standards, or keep it simple (and save disc space to boot) with 44.1/16-bit - the CD quality standard.

Audacity does not rip tracks off a CD, there are heaps of other programs that do that well enough (we like Audiograbber). Nor does it import video clips so you can edit the soundtrack to this. What Audacity does very well is record WAV files and let you cut, trim and copy chunks from them, apply effects, and export the results to WAV, MP3 (using the free LAME Codec) or Ogg Vorbis formats.

But it's the multitrack features that make this an outstanding effort for a freeware program. You can record a new track while listening to the existing ones; and as mentioned, record multiple channels at once. You can shift tracks left and right along the timeline, and each track has Mute and Solo buttons plus Pan and Volume sliders. It even has a volume envelope tool of sorts. These features are not as intuitive perhaps as more professional programs, but all in all they are excellent for a freeware tool. What it lacks that would make it really outstanding is real-time effects and perhaps looping features. As long as the community of programmers that created Audacity continue to support it, these features will eventually appear in the program. For the average user though, Audacity is a great audio editor.