New version! -WaveShop is a free, open-source audio editor for Windows XP/Vista/7/8 32-bit and 64-bit. WaveShop is fast, lightweight, and bit-perfect, meaning samples aren't altered unless they need to be. Editing a portion of an audio file only affects that portion; the rest of the file is untouched. Blocks of audio can be cut and pasted without changing their contents at all.
This is especially useful for patching a finished master without corrupting its dither. Waveshop's features include peak, RMS and spectral analysis, normalizing, fading, sample rate conversion, audio generation, plug-ins, and more, all with unlimited undo and comprehensive help.
Why not just use Audacity?
Audacity is awesome, but if you need to edit audio while exactly preserving its bits, you should be using WaveShop instead. For example, professionally finished masters are dithered, often by a mastering studio at considerable expense. Suppose you need to replace one track in a CD master without ruining the dither, i.e. without altering any bits in the other tracks, or in the new track. WaveShop can do this, but Audacity can't.
Audacity fails the null test, which is (for any type of editor): open a document, don't change anything, save as a different name, and binary compare the copy to the original. If you try this with Audacity, you'll find that the copy differs in many subtle ways, regardless of how Audacity's options are set. WaveShop passes the null test, and much care has been taken to avoid needlessly altering audio. Even in cases where alteration is unavoidable, such as normalization or fading, only the selected audio is affected.
Other reasons to use WaveShop:
- WaveShop does all editing and audio processing in memory, so it's very fast.
- WaveShop's interface is straightforward, and should feel natural to Windows users, because WaveShop is a native Windows app, unlike Audacity which only supports Windows indirectly through wxwidgets.
Features
- Bit-perfect: samples aren't changed needlessly
- Very fast: all processing is done in memory
- 64-bit version can edit files exceeding 2GB
- Clipboard: Copy/Cut/Paste/Insert/Delete
- Unlimited undo
- Normalize and/or fix DC offset
- Amplify (boost/attenuate)
- Fade in/out/custom, linear or logarithmic
- Peak statistics
- RMS statistics with histogram
- Reversal and inversion
- Find clipping with detailed report
- Extract channels to mono files
- Insert/delete/swap channels
- Change audio format
- Generate audio w/ envelopes and modulation
- Edit surround speaker assignments
- Find zero crossing
- Multiple Document Interface (MDI)
- Multithreaded processing
- Playback via DirectSound
WaveShop - 64bit software