GoldWave 5.67

GoldWave is a small but powerful software designed for audio processing. It is a fairly complex program, so beginners would have a hard time using it.

The installation takes place in quick steps, but the user interface can appear overwhelming for some people.

GoldWave's interface is divided into three windows: the main window (which keeps all the Sound windows altogether), Control window, and Sound windows.

The Control window includes real-time visuals and sound device controls. So, you can display sound during playback or while it's being recorded. You can open as many sound files as you like, but you can edit them one at a time.

The effect menu seems to be a little cluttered, but it offers quick access to commands like censor (replace the selection with silence, a tone, noise, the clipboard), doppler (dynamically change pitch), dynamics (distort, compress or limit output levels), echo, compressor/expander, filter (e.g. auto offset removal, equalizer, noise or silence reduction, smoother), and flanger.

Additionally, you can use interpolate (to smooth out waveforms between start and finish markers), invert, mechanize, reverb, time warp, voice over, resample, and others.

In the Tool menu, you can select Cue Points to mark and describe specific positions within audio tracks, Effect Chain Editor (to create and edit chain effects), Expression Evaluator, File Merger (for audio files only), or Speech Converter (converts text to speech, and spoken audio to text).

GoldWave uses a low amount of system memory, and it did not crash or jam during our tests. The help file is well-drawn but it would be improved by adding snapshots.

All in all, GoldWave is a great audio editor, and the price for the full version is quite reasonable.