Audacity is a really popular audio editor, especially for those looking for a free and open-source program to edit audio tracks. A great tool for those who need to record a podcast, compose music, or perform audio analysis but can’t – or don’t want to – afford a premium sound editing program like Ableton or Adobe Audition.
All these years, Audacity has been on the crest of the wave. The software changed owners in 2021, which brought several changes, such as the use of telemetry and a change in the privacy policy that the community did not like at all—audacity users.
Alternatives to Audacity: Other Free Audio Editors
Audacity is a free, open-source sound editor available on various desktop platforms such as Windows, Linux, and macOS. Therefore, the programs we recommend below follow a similar philosophy. That is, they are not commercial applications.
In any case, Audacity is very much Audacity, and all the tools we mention below have some shortcomings: they are either only available for Windows, or they are not open-source, or they lack some functionality within their feature set.
Tenacity and other Audacity forks
As soon as word broke that Audacity was changing hands, many developers ran to create forks from the project’s source code. All of the forks have pretty much the same features as the original Audacity, although there isn’t one that has stood out above the rest yet.
One that is receiving the most updates and development lately is Tenacity, the Audacity fork of Tenacityteam, which we can download from its Github repository.
Ocenaudio
Ocenaudio is a free, cross-platform audio editor that is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. A great application that includes a wide set of functionalities.
It offers support for VST plugins, real-time effects preview, multiple selections, support for heavy audio files, spectrogram, analysis options, and various sound effects (mute, invert audio, normalize).
Wavosur
One of the most notable limitations of Wavosur is that it is only available for Windows computers. The good thing is that it is a very light application. It will not take up much space on your hard drive.
Among its features, it offers:
- Support for VST plugins (essential if we want to use a MIDI keyboard).
- The possibility of cutting, copying, and pasting tracks.
- Several processing options.
- Resampled audios.
- Pitch changes.
- Erasing voices or sounds.
- Support for devices with ASIO driver.
- Frequency analysis and detailed statistical data.
