Audio comes from the Latin root audire, which means “hear” and means “sound.” Editing software is software designed to make various types of changes to media, text, etc. Audio editing software is editing software that focuses on refining and/or creating digital sound files, and an audio editing software program may be called an audio editor. There are several ways to categorize the different types of audio editing software.
Woman doing handstand with a computer
Audio editing software can be free or paid. Some audio editing software available for purchase has a free trial or demo version. Trials may be limited by the number of business days or length of recording that can be created/saved or the number of sessions it can be used for. Alternatively, paid software may have the ‘Save’ feature disabled.
Another way audio editing software can be distinguished is by the types of files it handles. Some audio editing software programs only handle a specific type of sound file, for example MP3. Others are equipped to work with a wide variety of file types, including AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format), AVI (Audio and Video Interleaved), MP2 and MP3 (Motion Picture Experts Group – MPEG formats), OGG, VOX, WAV (waveform). Audio file format and WMA (Windows Media Audio). Some audio editing programs can extract audio from a video file so that the user can work with it.
The existence and quality of help and support offerings is another differentiator. The products differ in that they provide written support in the form of FAQs, glossaries, a product manual, and tutorials. They may or may not have technical support or forums to address user issues. And the software may or may not have regular updates.
Audio editing software is made for a variety of operating systems, including Windows® 2000, Windows® XP, Windows® 7, Vista®, Mac® OS X, and Linux. It may only have editing features or be capable of other tasks like recording, converting, and recording. Audio editing software is usually a stand-alone program, but audio editing capabilities are sometimes included in software that also has video and image editing capabilities.
