DAW for cutting voiceovers and podcasts

[Brian Roth]

My best friend worked in radio 15+ years ago, and the station used Cool Edit Pro in production. He wants to ease back into production again with his new laptop.

I told him Audacity was free and has plenty of features....likely more than he will ever need. But, I thought I'd ask to see what other free apps would be suitable for these "simple" requirements. IOW, he's not starting a music recording studio.

Thanks.

Bri

 

[rock soderstrom]

There are some free DAWs, this one is very promising. Waveform free:

https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform-free

 

[kags]

I mention these because they all have workflows geared towards audio storytelling and not music creation.

Audacity is indeed very popular for podcasts and audiobooks and even has a plug-in for Audible’s QC, calls ACX Check. Excellent DAW all around for audio recording and editing. Free and easy!

Reaper is also popular, but much more complicated. Can be used indefinitely for free.

Audible Audition (if you already have the Adobe Creative Suite) is very good for podcasting and audiobooks.

Hindenburg is loved by radio journalists and audio storytellers. Not free, but around $100 (yearly subscription). This DAW includes audio to text transcriptions, text-based audio editing, and non-audio-engineer centric controls. Also features like auto leveling the stereo bus and auto mixing multitrack audio. Very pro in a simple package.

Ardour is a free DAW that is also used as the engine behind Harrison Mixbus. Adour runs on Mac, Win, and Linux and has excellent quality and functionally. Very pro.


Each one of these has pros and cons. For instance, some let you edit at faster than 1x playback. Some have great preset DSP settings, etc.