Free sound editor / converter? - audio

I'm looking for something like paint.net or Gimp, but for audio files, and runs on windows.

Audacity is fantastic

As already mentioned, Audacity is fantastic. If you're looking to batch convert sound files at the command line, check out mencoder and (for MP3s only) LAME.

Audacity is painfully limited. If you are looking to do something a little more complicated. You should check out Reaper. It has a 60 day free trial and if you are still doing editing and recording after that long, the price to buy is extremely cheap when compared to other fully functional editing software. Pro Tools is crazy expensive.

Personally I use REAPER for "complex" tasks (tracking, mastering, batch processing) and Audacity for basic cutting/normalizing/exporting to MP3.
If you need free alternative for Audacity for basic mono or stereo file processing, you may try Wavosaur or other software that has realtime previews.

NCH Wavepad is also the best application for the audio. it's easy to understand

Reaper has always worked very well for me. It is free to download and try for 60 days and requires a cheap license after that (there are two different price options). Highly recommended.
Here is the website link:
http://www.reaper.fm/

Related

Algorithm to remove vocal from audio file

I know this has already been posted more than 10 years ago but I want to believe that some progress has been made on this side. (we have Deepfake nowadays, so much progress on the AI side).
I tried some tutorials with audacity but was highly disappointed with the result (to be fair the resulting output is not that bad, but not good enough for prod).
What reputable algorithm could I use to process myself a mp3 file and remove the vocals while preserving the drums and centered instruments, and removing vocal echo?
This task is known in the community as "Vocal Source Separation" or "Vocal Signal Separation" or "Singing Voice Source Separation", which are specialized "Music Source Separation" tasks, again an example of the more general "Source Separtion" task.
Here are some papers: Music Source Separation.
One of the most actively developed open source solutions is Spleeter, which has been used commercially in various audio products. There is an online tool based on it, you can try it out at Splitter.ai. The "2 stem" version will give you one track with vocals, and one track with everything else.

Getting multiple audio clips to same level

I am working on a project that involves using a lot of found audio clips (some new, some very old archival and poor quality etc).
I am trying to figure out a way to have all audio clips to be of a similar quality (if this is possible) and play at a similar volume?
I have use of both audacity and ableton...any suggestions would be great.
What you are asking for is commonly called normalization. There are several tools that can do it, including commandline tools and also audacity.
You'll find the tool in audacity under Effect > Normalize...
You can select multiple audio tracks.
You could also consider using a limiter and/or a compressor on your track. Have a look in the Live effect reference for more info on these: https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/live-audio-effect-reference/
The results will not be as good as applying normalization by hand, but it will be a lot quicker.

AIFF files: strip initial "whitespace"

I have a folder full of AIFF files that have a little gap at the beginning where no sound is heard. How would I go about writing a script/tool that'd remove this gap?
Basically the files look like this in Audacity (I want to get only the selected part):
I can't really use Audacity because I have hundreds of the files so doing it by hand is not an option.
I don't care too much about the OS / language, as long as it works.
since you are asking on a programmer's website and have programming experience (peeked at your profile) -- if you look in the sources, you will see Audacity has some scripting support.
there are also commercial tools (e.g. batch processors) for this.
i wouldn't recommend getting your hands too dirty with this file format (i.e. writing a C program could easily take more time than doing it manually in the editor).
In the end it was just easier to hack up a quick C++ solution using libsndfile.
Feel free to steal it from https://github.com/houbysoft/short/blob/master/removeInitialSilence.cpp.

Crossplatform Offline Audio Processing Library

I am looking for an audio dsp library for cleaning up some speech (voice) recording. I have not decided which language to use yet.
Here are the feature I am looking for:
Work in Linux and Windows
Importing MP3
Working with multiple channels mixing
Noise Filter
Bandpass filter
Compressor
I love to have these as well, but I can write my own if they are not available:
De-esser
multi-band compressor
Expender
Envelopes
(if you can suggest an application that do these in scripting / one mouse click, I will accept your answer too)
What about something like SoX?? http://sox.sourceforge.net/
Take a look at Juce from Raw Material Software.
It is free for non-commercial use, and very reasonably priced for commercial use. it also has a lot of built in audio capabilities (mixing, file I/O, etc.) and has a nice cross platform GUI toolkit as well.
Audacity does most of those things.

Is there open source audio feature extraction software avaliable?

I undertaking a personal project which involves the development of a system which will automatically generate audio thumbnail clips (about 30 seconds in length) from a full length track.
In order to do this I want to look at the energy and pitch of the audio to try and correctly identify its major structural features.
Is there any open source software available that can do energy/pitch extraction? If not I will start looking into alternative methods using MATLAB.
Thanks!
YAAFE (Yet Another Audio Feature Extractor) http://yaafe.sourceforge.net/ does audio feature extraction in MATLAB, Python and C.
You might want to look into the Echo Nest API. It has a lot of audio analysis capabilities, and I know there's a script bundled in the Remix package that can automagically turn songs into shorter or longer versions (I believe the script is called earworm).
Audacity may do it.
Try JAudio which can extract features from an audio.
MARSYAS contains bextract for analysis, can find MFCCs and various other timbral and spectral features. http://marsyas.info/

Resources