WavePad Audio Editing Software for Windows

Excellent free sound editor

Wavepad is a feature-rich, free sound editor for Windows. You can record from audio inputs, like a microphone or a record player, or import and edit sound files.

Easy to use and flexible

The range of options in WavePad is impressive. You can add effects, fades, split tracks, merge tracks, and much more. Performing all of these tasks is easy, and easy to undo if you make a mistake. It's certainly user-friendly, and the fact you can import more or less any sound file format makes it incredibly accessible for anyone (there's no need to mess around with file conversion).

Not quite an Audacity beater

As well as importing from your hard drive, you can also import directly from CD, and there's a tool to burn whatever you want. There is a tone generator, and even a text to speech generator, so you can express yourself with a robotic voice.

There are tabs at the bottom of the edit window for you to move easily between open files, a zoom tool so it's easy to highlight exactly the part you want when editing, and the highlighting itself is really intuitive, allowing you to apply effects with precision.

Overall. Wavepad is a great alternative to Audacity, the open source standard for sound file editing. However, of the two apps, Audacity still wins in terms of flexibility and you get all of its features for free (some of Wavepad's options are only available in paid editions of the program).

A great free way to edit sound files