I've finally found an audio editor that can easily clean up the interview recordings I have saved to my computer hard drive. I didn't want to spend 'big money' but I was looking for some important features. Here's a great free program I settled on.

The program is called Audacity from Sourceforge and you can download it for free here.

Screen-shot of the Free Audacity Audio Editor

The reason I was searching for an audio editor, was because I wanted to remove some of the un-necessary breaks, pauses, coughs and splutters from several of the important seminar recordings I have saved on my computer.  Recordings which I would like to add to the members area of this site over the coming weeks, (similar to the John Carlton audio I added last week).

It would also come in handy for generally cleaning up the sound quality of several other audio files I have such as:

• Online audio-Interviews I have downloaded
• The sound files to my video-tutorial CD ROMs
• Audio Messages for my Web sites.

I did not want anything as fancy, but wanted something that would quickly and easily be able to:

• Amplify quiet sections of the recording
• Reduce the amount of background noise
• Fade in and out.
• Cut sections.
• Convert Stereo recordings to Mono.

This free audio editor does all this and is very straight forward to use.

(1) Open up the audio file you want (.wav, .aiff, .au, .mp3 etc)

(2) Click and drag over the audio portion you wish to apply editing effects to

(3) Choose the effect you wish to apply from the Effect choices on the menu.

(4) Save the file or export the file to another audio file format (including MP3)

This is a very capable, yet simple audio editor. If you use audio at all on your computer, it is well worth including in your tool kit of software programs.

Download it for free here.