Free Audio Editor 9.3.4

You won’t find many free audio editing tools with the plethora of features, functions, effects, and extra utilities that Free Audio Editor offers. Complete with a waveform graphical display, noise correction tools, equalizer, normalizer, frequency analyzer, and a long list of filters and correction tools, FAEMedia has thrown in two extra utilities that none of its competitors is capable of offering – certainly not for free.

The program opens with a neat four-option menu where you can open a new file, record new audio, grab audio tracks from a CD, and turn text into speech. But it is when you see the program’s main interface that you start envisaging the amount of options and features that you can use on your audio files. Regardless of the option you chose, the active audio file will be presented to you as a waveform graph, the most convenient way of displaying an audio file for editing.

Apart from all the basic editing functions that you would expect from a pro-looking audio editor regarding stereo effects, filters, EQ parameters, delays, audio inversion, time, and pitch, etc., Free Audio Editor will let you restore your digitized analog recordings by applying a series of algorithms that will clean effectively the pops and clicks of your vinyls, and the background hiss of your cassette tapes. Among the “extra tools”, de CD ripper and burner, the basic ID3 tag editor, and the above-mentioned text-to-speech function are surely worth noting. However, FAEMedia has also included in this free tool the possibility of importing audio from any existing video file (audio extraction) and of downloading audio from YouTube videos. These are probably the two features that – after reviewing quite a number of audio editors – have really struck me as out of the ordinary. Even though the functionality they present is not new, it is certainly a novelty to see it included in a standard audio editor, and a 100% free audio editor, for that matter.

All functions are fully customizable so that the results fit your requirements and preferences, and the results can be saved in any of the (only) four codecs supported for the output – WAV, Ogg, MP3, and WMA.

During the installation process, you will be asked a number of times if you’re interested in installing a number of other non-related tools. Read carefully all messages unless you want to clutter your computer with a series of unrequested apps. Every time you open Free Audio Editor you’ll be asked to upgrade to an inexistent “New version (sic) to avoid malfunctions”, which is but an excuse to offer you the same tools over again. Considering the reward, however, going through all these annoying ads and offers is still worth the trouble.