Wavosaur
Wavosaur weighs in at a total uncompressed filesize of 491K and is the only product in this review that requires no installation, which makes it extremely portable. What surprised me about it was that, for such a small program, Wavosaur packs a lot of advanced features, including resample, bit-depth convert (8,16,24,32 bits), pitch shift, vocal removal, DC offset removal, auto-trim, silence remover, interpolate, auto detect region, crossfade loop, and export of multiple .wav files from regions. It also supports ASIO drivers and VST plug-ins, has many analysis tools and is skinnable.
Kristal Audio Engine
Kristal Audio Engine is a powerful multi-track recorder, audio sequencer and mixer - ideal for anyone who wants to get started with recording, mixing and mastering digital audio. According to their website, "It is designed as a modular system. The main application provides a mixing console, while the audio sequencer, live audio input and so on are loaded as separate Plug-Ins". It supports an ASIO audio driver, which may be appealing to those who are concerned with latency during multi-track recording. It's based on a 32-bit floating-point audio engine that can handle sample rates of 44 to 192 kHz with word sizes of 16, 24 or 32 bits. It comes with a three-band parametric EQ and supports WAVE, AIFF, FLAC, and OGG Vorbis file formats. It can only handle a maximum of 16 audio tracks, though the web site mentions an upcoming version 2 that will handle more tracks and provide support for MIDI, virtual instruments, and a wider range of VST plugins. Like all media-editing programs, Kristal requires a modern fast PC. Don't even think about using it with a sub-1Ghz machine.
Audacity
Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information.
