Audacity is a free software program that provides a multitude of uses for audio editing. It allows users to record, edit, import and export audio material on their computers.

The benefit of Audacity is that it specifically deals with all things “audio”, such as recording live audio through a microphone or mixer, and converting recordings from cassette tapes, vinyl records or minidiscs into a digital format.

Another feature is the ease with which you can use different formats such as WAV, AIFF and MP3 amongst others. It can also remove noise from your recordings, has multi-track mixing, and is available on both Windows and Mac platforms.

The simple but effective editing tools it provides like cut, copy, delete and paste allow for powerful audio manipulation. Many podcasters use Audacity because of its availability and multiplatform support.

By virtue of being open source and such an effective audio editing program, Audacity is growing in popularity, currently receiving 30,000 downloads a day.