Audacity
Sound editing is fun. If you're really bored, and have a fertile imagination, then it's probably the right thing for you. Or maybe you just want to edit that song the school band made, record a podcast: Audacity promises to be your trusty companion in your endeavors.
We would like to point out here that Audacity certainly is NOT a direct competitor to commercial software like Adobe Audition, Adobe Soundbooth, or Sony SoundForge – and we don't want to portray Audacity in that manner either. However, for educational institutions / purposes, or for the casual user, Audacity is more than enough – and what's more, it's free; unlike commercial software which would come with licenses which would be prohibitively costly for educational institutions. Top that off with an easy-to-use interface and extendability using an immense number of community-developed plugins, and you've got one cracker of a software
