Audacity is a great free audio editor, popular even amongst Windows users. It is a small but powerful software. This is an overview of some basic tasks you can do with Audacity, but there are many more you will discover as you explore the software.

Load a track by going to File > Open and selecting a file. To trim a track, select the portion of it that you want to remove, and hit delete. To reduce noise, select the entire track, go to Effect > Noise removal. Tweak the settings and click on OK. This step will take some time, and you will have to make two or three passes to reduce the noise properly.

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To record audio, press the round circular red button. You will get a number of options to save the file as. To transcode, go to File > Export > Advanced Options, and 'select a suitable format. Wav and Flac are lossless high definition formats, whereas ogg and mp3 are lossy formats, but give better compression. For more options, click on other. The lower the bitrate, the smaller filesize will be:

To generate a tone, for testing speakers, or putting a test signal before a track, go to Generate>Tone. There are three methods of generating a tone. You can also use the generate menu to generate white and pink noise. To play around with the track, look into the effects m€nu, there are a wide range of effects and plugins you may like to use.