Audacity is a very capable audio editor, probably the best known of the open source, free applications. It has a strong benefit of being cross-platform, so you can use it on Windows, Mac and Linux workstations. But I received an email this morning from Sony announcing that they’ve just released ACID Xpress 7 as a free application to anyone who signs up for their ACIDplanet.com site, which is also free. The one fly in the ointment is that ACID, like all of Sony’s audio software applications, is Win OS only.
Sony ACID is a software program most often thought of for music production, taking various musical elements and loops and combining them into a fresh mix. What a lot of people don’t realize is that ACID works prefectly well as an audio editor. It’s more similar in style to the way Sony VEGAS handles audio editing than Sound Forge, but there are strong similarities across the Sony line.
ACID Xpress 7 will handle up to 10 tracks of audio and even comes with unlimited MP3 encodes, something you don’t get (build-in) with Audacity.