audio editing software for windows

You might want to give GoldWave a try. It is a popular choice amongst NVDA users on Windows, and NVDA even has an add-on to make it even more user-friendly. Links below.

GoldWave:
https://goldwave.com/

GoldWave Add-on:
https://addons.nvda-project.org/addons/goldwave.en.html

Note: I do not use this software personally, I just know of its existence, and that it is reportedly very accessible with NVDA.

HTH.

I used Gold Wave for years and years. It adapts itself to screen reader mode. When I used it, there wasn't an add-on and it was still great. Simple. Limited to editing a single track, but basic editing is great.
Reaper has a steeper learning curve and does essentially everything anyone has ever thought about doing in an audio editor. It's crazy. Jamie Tate has written the OSARA Reaper plugin to make the app very accessible, including a key to provide an accessible standardize set of controls for audio plugins (the Mac version doesn't have this). Garth Humphreys did a great series of podcasts about using Reaper with a screen reader, and there's a "Reaper without peepers" user forum.
The fundamental advantage of Reaper is that it's a multi-track editor. So, for instance, background music on a different track, edited independently. You can even chop up video in one track and do the music or whatever in another. In GoldWave, once you've mixed in the music, it's there in the single file, end of story. I did it, though, and enjoyed doing it.
Also, I may be misremembering GoldWave's limitations: it's been quite a few years.
Also: reaper is non-destructive. Everything is done with an editing decision list (EDL). Basically, all the commands you do to the file. The source files are not modified, and everything can be undone.
The GoldWave manual actually has a lot of good info on audio editing as it explains all its functions, so that's a great place to learn.

I too chose to dive into audio editing, and after chatting with a friend of mine who does this for a living, he suggested Reaper and I've been using it ever since.

It's true that it does take some getting use to, but if you have the Osara plugin, plus the SWS plugin, you can learn to use it too.

You can also use it with JAWS, but would recommend you get the JAWS scripts for Reaper from Snowman.

I would also recommend you check out the "Reapers without Peepers" Google group page at https://groups.io/g/rwp.

After using a number of audio editing programs, I would recommend either Audacity or Reaper.

Audacity is free and open source. They put a lot of work into making it screen reader friendly with lots of useful hotkeys. Audacity also supports multi-track editing. It comes with lots of useful plug-ins for things like compression, revereb, etc., etc. You can also import other plug-ins that you find on the net. There are also screen-reader specific instructions for using Audacity if you search for them on the web.

Reaper is a commercial audio editing program that supports a very extensive range of functions for editing multi-track audio. It is used by many professionals both blind and sighted. Amazingly, it only cost about $60. Reaper also comes with a number of free plug-ins for compression, reverb, delay, etc., and many more are available from free libraries that are easy to import as well as other places. As mentioned, Reaper has been made very accessible for both Macs and PCs if you install the Osara program. If you use JAWS, you should definitely install the Snowman's scripts. The Reapers Without Peepers e-mail forum is a great site for getting advice from other blind users. The only issue with Reaper is that, since there are so many built-in functions and actions, it can be a steep learning curve. Its UI paradigm can also be a bit tricky for beginners. Fortunately there are sdtep by step guides you can find on the Reaper's Without Peepers forum that can quickly get a beginner going on simple tasks. I use Reaper for editing the Eyes On Success podcast.

The other option worth considering if you only want to do podcast is the Studio Recorder program from APH. Although this costs about $200 last time I checked, it is an extremely easy program to use and was made specifically for use with screen readers. This is the program that many people use to produce talking books. 'the downside, besides the price, is that it only works for a single mono or stereo track.

Anyway, I hope those explanations help. good luck with your podcast!

--Pete

I second the recommendation for goldwave. Fantastic program. I also have Studio Recorder, and it's a good program, but you can do more in Goldwave. If you don't actually need multitrack, then it will more than do the job.

Reaper does everything you'd need and more.

I haven't used Audacity that much but Reaper has its own drawbacks, including the fact that non-destructive means that you have to work with projects rather than the source material itself, which -in turn- means that you have to render/export the output file every time you make a change. In GoldWave, however, you use standard Windows commands to open a file, and simple operations like "select all", "cut", "copy" and "paste". You then hit Ctrl+S and done!

No, you don't have to export every time you make a change. You have to export if you want a final version.

Suppose you have a project called podcast. To keep it simple, this project is a single track. In Goldwave, you save it, then you decide, oh I wanted some echo on my voice. So you do that and then save it again. But now, that track just has echo on your voice, you can't do anything about it if you decide you want it removed or want more or less echo.

Now, we do the same thing in Reaper, you record into your project named podcast, and save it. Now somewhere there's a wav file, probably named with a string of gibberish, associated with your podcast project. If you apply echo and save that project, that wave file is unchanged. So if you load your project again and want to get rid of the echo, or make it more or less echo, no problem, you just change the settings on the plugin you've added.

When you've got Podcast the way you want it, in both cases, you want to save again. Now, in Reaper, yes, you need to export, Reaper calls it rendering. So when you go, "OK, I did my podcast on chicken nuggets, so I want Food Rager - Episode 3 - The Chicken Nugget Crisis, you have to render your project to that filename and with whatever settings you want. In essence, it would be like if you wanted to save your project as an mp3 file instead of a wav file in Goldwave.

In other words, rendering is the final step of the project. The only reason you'd need to render multiple times is if you wanted to hear it somewhere else, on other speakers, and you wanted to hear the version with echo and the version without echo, to compare them.

Then, yes, you'd be exporting multiple times. But generally speaking, you only need to export when you want a mix to take somewhere else, whether that's the final version you're going to upload somewhere or make an mp3 of or whatever, or whether you want to compare different versions of your project on another system and you need audio files to play.

Whether you're creating a sound effect for use in a game or app, a song or soundtrack, a podcast episode or anything else, you still do have to render/export/save the project to an audio file that can be played on not only other devices but your very own computer, as a media player or a game won't do what to do with a Reaper project. So you'll have to replace the audio file with the newer one every time you make a change. As for the original source audio being accessible in the project folder, that file would be the raw recording or anything you import, without any effects or other changes.

Khomus, I appreciate the explanation about the benefits of project files. My background is in Sound Forge, and I only use it for editing the very occasional AppleVis Podcast when other members of the team are not available; or to edit my own personal live recordings of trains.

If I understand you correctly (which I may not), Reaper will allow me to change effects after they have been applied? For example, let's say I apply trebble and bass boosts, then add a fade in and out to either side of the recording. Could I then go back in and adjust the level of the bass boost without redoing the whole project? Or would I still need to go back to the raw audio and start over.

Thanks!

Yes, that's right. You could go in and adjust the bass levels or whatever.

As for changes, yes. If you're saving twelve versions of a file, and you want those twelve versions to play on something else, you'll have to render. But like, nobody does that. At least, nobody sensible does. You do all of your effects and mixing and trimming or whatever, and save the final version.

Sometimes you might want to do this, say you have a normal mix and a surround mix. Then yes, you'd have to render two different files. But my point is, again, think of editing something in Goldwave or Soundforge.

You apply a bass boost, for example. Then you go, oh, I also wanted to apply treble. You don't have to export the bass boosted file, then apply the treble, then export that new file. You can just apply those effects, undo or change one or both of them, whatever. Then you export the final version(s).

Let me talk about multi-track stuff a bit, to show where it might help, even if you only think you need a single track. Suppose you're recording a podcast, and you're doing a demo on your phone. Now, you can absolutely set up your microphone level, set the volume of your phone's screen reader so it fits in with your voice, and record a single track.

But you can also, with the right interface, record the microphone on one track, and the phone on the other. Then, if you need to balance levels, let's say, you can just do that to whichever track needs it. If you're recording guests and have two microphones, or are recording with Teams or Zoom or something, again, you can probably get you on one track and the guest on the other. Do you need to cut out an umm or your guest coughing or something? No problem, do it on their own track, yours is fine.

So even if you're doing something you *could* do on one track, it might be able to simplify your process, once you get to grips with learning the new software, of course.

I'm quite used to such insults but at least as tired of them. Anyway, try to share something with a friend and ask him or her to listen to it and provide feedback. Suppose this friend does not have Reaper installed and you have to render the project every time you make a change to share the updated version, especially if you wish the friend to collaborate in some way. Besides, I never said Reaper's method was absolutely worse. It does have its own advantages, like the fact that you don't have to keep every raw recording, stem or unfinished version as checkpoints or source material, and go back to them if you have to recreate the final audio from scratch. Things like panning or volume adjustment are so seamless and intuitive in Reaper, as opposed to GoldWave, but just trimming a record shouldn't be that difficult as done in Reaper, so simple operations like fading, mixing or trimming is where GoldWave shines. You don't have to import or render anything and then deal with extra project files. So acknowledge that Reaper does introduce unnecessary extra complexity in several situations.

This has nothing to do with insulting anybody. First, as your mixing skills improve, you'll have to do fewer exports. But here's what you wrote:

"I haven't used Audacity that much but Reaper has its own drawbacks, including the fact that non-destructive means that you have to work with projects rather than the source material itself, which -in turn- means that you have to render/export the output file every time you make a change."

This is simply not true. You can make all kinds of changes in Reaper, and saving is the exact same process. So what does Reaper add? Rendering, where if you want an output file of multiple tracks in a stereo or mono mix, or a single track with any effects applied to play in a media player or whatever, then yes, you have to export/render.

So let's break this down. You have a single track you've recorded. In Goldwave, you apply an effect, save it, and then that's it. That track has that effect on it forever. However, if you're going to share it with a friend to check your mix or whatever, you're probably unlikely to share a wav file, because they're usually pretty huge. You're way more likely to share an mp3 or flac file. Then, you're exporting, just like you would be in Reaper.

If you're doing a bunch of different mixes, essentially, say one version of the file with echo and another shifted in pitch or what have you, in order to do this in Goldwave, you're either doing a save as and creating a file with a different name for each effect, and then exporting it, or exporting the newly changed track directly to some sort of compressed format, while noting down what effects you used so you can recreate whatever you settle on after checking with your friend I guess, so again, just like rendering in Reaper.

Now let's look at Reaper, same situation. First, you can add however many effects you want, and then just hit ctrl/cmd-s to save. That's all in your project now. If you want to make different mixes, you can just bypass an effect, say echo, and then render the version with the pitch shift or whatever to a file to share, so again, just like Goldwave here, in terms of steps you have to go through.

My point is, basic saving is exactly the same, you hit ctrl or cmd and 's', depending on whether you're on Windows or a Mac. In some cases with Goldwave, you also have to add an extra step, either to save different wav files with effects or export compressed files with those effects.

In Reaper, you just add effects. You save any changes to your project with the exact same keystroke you use in Goldwave. The *only* time you add the extra step of rendering is when you want some kind of output file outside of Reaper. You don't have to render a file "every time you make a change". I'm sorry but that statement is just wrong. Yes, if you want something you or somebody else can play outside of Reaper, then you have to render. I guess if you're sharing raw wav files from Goldwave this is adding a single extra step for Reaper, but as I've pointed out above, you'll often want to add a step like this in Goldwave as well.

Yes, Reaper can be a *lot* more complicated than Goldwave. It can do multiple tracks, for one thing. Goldwave, like SOundforge, conceptualizes a track as a single timeline, Reaper does regions, which it calls items. But I don't think that complexity really comes from having to render in Reaper and not do anything like that in Goldwave. Even assuming it does, you don't have to render every single time something changes with your audio.

You save normally, just like Goldwave. You only render when you want a sharable output format. Goldwave makes this simpler if your sharable output format is always one single wav file that you're working with. But if you want multiple versions of your work, or a file in a compressed format to upload to Dropbox for instance, then you're adding an export/rendering step, just like Reaper, and possibly an extra step of doing a save as in Goldwave, if you want to preserve wav files of the different versions of your work.

Maybe this comparison will help. Imagine you have Microsoft Word, and your friend doesn't. If you're writing something, you don't have to export to a text file or RTF or whatever. You just write whatever your changes are and save the Word file as you go. Yes, it's true that if you want to share five different versions with your friend, you're going to have to export five different files. But you don't export every single time you change something.

You export when there are significant differences that you want your friend to help you choose between. If you're only sharing wav files from Goldwave, that's like you and your friend both having Word, or you writing a text file in Notepad or something. But if you're using Word and your friend can't read those files, then yes, you have to export. And, just as you learn from your friend's writing advice and can know better things to do so you have to check with them less often, so too you can learn the same thing with audio, and have to send fewer files.

My limitted audio background is from audacity, which is... whatever it is :)
I really, really, am adict to the pixel selection in reaper, it's so satisfying. But to get anything there to work is, intimidating for a beginner in real DAW.
I do follow a (french (quebecois) guy and it's very helpful.
We should thank NVAccess for two great products, not one.

1. I do know I should avoid sharing WAV files, and I do also know that I should avoid lossy compression where possible. So I share MP3 or FLAC files with friends depending on the situation.
2. Only once have I actually collaborated with someone from Romania to make one of my excellent short tracks, as I had no realistic saxophone plug-in that I could use for free. And yes, not everyone can afford everything you Westerners can buy so easily. I've collected and modified several free plug-ins and samples to use with Reaper's own sampler. I make several different genres of music from electronic to orchestral, medieval, Turkish, Arabic and Asian, most of which you probably know nothing about. I have experimented with multiple methods to achieve exceptional realism in all those genres, including scales beyond your Western semitones, as Reaper lacks those options as an obvious result of it being Western-oriented. Having said all those, one more drawback of Reaper is that it prioritizes music production rather than plain sound design, resulting in its interface and default configuration being music-focused. Anyway, I use Reaper for free. I translated GoldWave into Turkish and requested a license from the dev to use it for free. I made all my tracks without paying a single penny, and they're still great. PM me and I can send you some of them. So I do know what I'm talking about and if I sound like I'm bragging about stuff that's not worth your attention, then either do request me to send you my tracks or just skip this post and mind your own business. However, do acknowledge in either case that I'm merely responding to an insult. I'm not really happy wasting my time trying to prove my skill and knowledge but I feel compelled to do so. As for telling you to feel more than free to PM me, it's because it may be considered off-topic and also because my stuff might be stolen that I'm not sharing them with everyone.
3. You have to configure every setting properly that you minimize the risk of losing any data or unfinished work in case of a power outage. Rendering/exporting an audio file alone won't let you actually save your project so your project and the exported audio are essentially two different things. Plus, there's always the possibility of having to reset your computer and losing Reaper along the process, so I always keep a backup of my tracks as audio files so I can share them more quickly if I want or have to, or just in case I can't access the project for whatever reason.

As it happens, you would be wrong my friend. I know quite a lot about all of that. I've been collecting and learning about world music, both music and instruments, for quite a while now. I think my latest instrument acquisition is the Armenian duduk, which makes my face hurt when I play it. So we'll see how that ends up going. No, I lie, I think the darbuka was later. I started with drummbel (Jew's harp), then bansuri, and went from there

Also, I don't assume everybody's just buying stuff.

If you haven't seen them yet, check out the Full Bucket synths. They are free, or at least donation although I didn't find a place to donate yet. They're pretty amazing.

If you use Surge XT, these are some pretty good patches I jsut stumbled across, for free.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFUuYHd-tDo

Looks like someone needs a lesson in how daws, or in this case, how reaper works. You do, *do not* have to export every single time you wanna save a change. That's all done from with in the project. I've been working in production for a long time and reaper is really powerful when it comes to nondestructive editing. If power goes out, as long as you have your projects saved you will not lose anything. No need to export files. If anything I do it if I wanna listen to a draft of a mix I have on separate speakers but that's the whole mix. Goldwave is nothing to how reaper works. Your statements are plain further from the truth. Also, what's indeed wrong with wave? You need to do that if you're working on projects with anyone unless you want your stuff to sound like trash with who ever you're working on because you won't export to wave. Now, if you're sharing online, I can get behind that but most websites allows you to share wave anyways so I do not understand the fuss here at all. Very rarely to I export as .mp3 unless an artist wants it but most, never do. If anything, if you export to wave and send it in like an IMessage or whatever, IMessage will just automatically convert the file into m4a anyways so no reason for export as mp3 at all. You also said that you should avoid exporting to a lossy format. My guy, mp3 is a lossy format! Please do more research on this matter before saying that. Wave is usually lossless unless you export with a codec with in the container that's using lossy compression. In which case, you're probs not using PCM when exporting to wave which you should. Let's go back to mp3 for a second and I'll absolutely tell you why I will not use mp3 at all. The more you open and then export the same file into mp3, multiple times, the more data you're going to compress, leaving as a result, a lower quality file and that data, of which you compressed, you can never, get back. Wave, you will not have that issue because it's usually lossless, depending on the encoding used. Most people use PCM. The only time I'll use mp3, if anything is if it's my final touch on whatever I need to do for a project and I know I'm not gunna go back and edit Even if I did, I'll do it from the project itself, not the file. Also, in your prospective to sound design, you, can, absolutely do that in reaper! Just because reaper is primarily used in music production, that statement means not what you think it means so I'll just throw that out the window right now. I've done sound design in reaper, I've edited podcasts in reaper. man, I've done many, different, things with a few daws and many daws has different focuses on different things but that don't mean you can't use them for anything else for what you need to do to get the job done. So let's just throw, the fact that reaper prioritizes on music production out because that argument is not even valid at this point. I'll admit that some daws clame they are better at doing certain things but them certain things, depends on how people work, and what they like to use to get the certain part of the job done.

1. I never said you would have to export your track to an audio file to save your changes. In fact, I said the entire opposite (i.e., that exporting the track as an audio file wouldn't mean your project itself would be saved). I wrote that in response to the claim that I was wrong to say you would have to export/render the project every time you made a change. Okay, I do acknowledge that I have to rephrase it and say, you have to export/render the project every time you want to copy the track or sound to another folder for use in some other game or program, or to share it with someone else, whether to collaborate, ask for feedback, or just to share your stuff with others. So Reaper indeed does add an extra step, unlike GoldWave where saving the file itself is enough for all your changes to be applied to the audio file itself.
2. I did say I would avoid lossy compression where possible, but not every file you have to share as FLAC. It's totally fine to share drafts or other stuff where quality is not essential in MP3 format. So FYI, FLAC is just another lossless format that you can and should prefer over WAV in most cases, as it helps you compress the file and reduce the size to about half of the same audio in WAV format. And I use Windows and this thread is already intended for discussing DAWS that can be used on Windows in particular so I'll ignore the nonsense on iMessage
3. Finally, I never said Reaper was designed exclusively to make music.

I'd advise you to not twist what I said above just so you think what you are saying is valid. I did not say that you said that reaper is exclusive to music. Please read, what I said very carefully. With regards to wave and or flac, it's true that flac is smaller but yet I don't use it because it's not supported much with every daw out there. If you wanna be universally working with other, people using a wide range of daws, wave is the best way to go. Flac ain't the end all be all my friend. If you want limited support, be my guest. A lot of people and most in this industry still prefer wave and if ya wanna work with a lot of people then you're gunna want to do what they prefer. Coming at this from my line of work both as a session player and as a producer. Just because you can export as flac, doesn't mean it's the best format for everyone to use. That's my take!

Alright, you should begin by learning to not distort what I wrote earlier: "one more drawback of Reaper is that it prioritizes music production rather than plain sound design, resulting in its interface and default configuration being music-focused.". Nowhere in this sentence do I explicitly claim or imply that you can't use Reaper for sound design. I was just referring to all the features from the MIDI editor, metronome and support for VST instruments to other things including how the menus and interface are designed with music production rather than soune design in mind, which -in turn- includes how you navigate by bars and beats unless you modify the default configuration etc.. As for WAV vs. flac files, I do have a few friends that also use Reaper and do audio editing but almost all of my friends just listen to my or others' tracks or sounds as ordinary listeners. While some are interested in music and can play some instruments like the piano, they wouldn't care that much about whether I share FLAC, WAV or MP3 files with them. And I doubt you can notice the difference between uncompressed or lossless audio vs lossy compression, so don't expect that from those who hear everything as listeners only, with no prior music or sound design knowledge. I do know I have to work with and share WAV files where necessary though.

Okay, by you saying that reaper prioritizes itself on music production tells me everything. While you did not state that you can't use reaper in sound designing directly, you absolutely implied it as such. What does reaper and it's interface prioritizing itself on music production have to do with anything in your arguments and why write that in the first place then. Your point on that falls flat and holds no value at least from my standpoint. You do realize that most , daws prioritizes itself on some form of music production weather it be TV, film or anything else yes? And you do realize that a lot of people use stuff like protools to do sound design and what does protools prioritize it's daw from? The only thing that I think would come close to being heavily focused on sound design is adobe audition but as we, can't really use that, we're out of luck with that. I can see that we ain't gunna go no where with this convo so I'll just leave that... here.

OP was asking for advice on audio editing software, and which piece of software will be good for a beginner. And you all are arguing like a bunch of elementary school children, about which piece of software is the best, simply because you guys say so.
Rather, why not argue in a more constructive fashion, and simply explain your preferred preferences, which software you enjoy using, and why. And leave all of the childish arguing for people who actually don't know any better. 🙂‍↔️🙄

had I not been described as someone doing or arguing stuff that nobody sensible would do or say in the very first place. I'm genuinely and seriously tired of having to prove myself and my points and knowledge in order to be able to convince a certain bunch of people on here, and having to respond to their deliberate, nonsensical, accusatory, humiliating, dismissive and disdainful remarks.

Getting back to topic 😊
Which of the accessible Windows options has the best (or compatibility with the best) mastering plugins for limitor, compressor, etc.? I have been a user of Sound Forge 10.0 since 2009, and my use case is primarily for editing live recordings of trains and the very occasional podcast. I do not do music production, nor do I wish to. I mastered all of my recordings using the iZotope Mastering Effects Limiter that came with Sound Forge, and I got great results. However, Sound Forge 10 is quite dated, and I unfortunately lost the installer for the iZotope bundle. If I'm going to learn something new, I want to go with the best option. If Reaper offers better plugins than Gold Wave, for example, I'm willing to try to learn it.
Thanks for any help!

GoldWave has pretty much everything Reaper offers (compression/expansion, limiter, gate, volume adjustment/normalization etc.), though one thing Reaper definitely outperforms GoldWave is noise reduction. ReaFir, the plug-in that comes with Reaper as part of Cockos' own set of plug-ins, already does a good job of removing background hiss/noise in many cases, but you can also use Bertom Audio Demoiser as a free alternative. The latter is more of a frequency band filter though, so you need the paid version if you want to have per-band thresholds and the option to have the plug-in extract the noise profile automatically to better preserve audio quality. The GoldWave user manual is also quite detailed, and the program is quite accessible and relatively simpler to use, but since GoldWave lets you work on the file loaded rather than projects, it won't offer you the ability to keep the original recording as you make changes to your project, as opposed to Reaper.

I think these are accessible. So thefirst thing I'd check, if you know and like their stuff, is if Goldwave can use them. I haven't used GW since version 6.something so I have no idea if it can use plugins like that or not.

The price for studio recorder that I see is 50 dollars, I am not sure if this price is limited time offering, or if they truly lowered the price, I would recommand gold wave, reaper and studio recorder if you are wanting all rounded recording solutions.