WavePad Sound Editor

Since we are working with the sound editing software, Audacity, I thought I would post about another free program, WavePad.  My dad got me into WavePad during college and I have been using it ever since.  I have used it for editing old vinyl albums to cd, editing simple recordings, and editing soundclips for sound effects in my indoor percussion ensembles. 

WavePad's interface is essentially a media player with a spectral display, time indicators, and specialized controls for manipulating the audio signal. We browsed to a folder of CD tracks we'd ripped as WAVs and selected one. WavePad displayed the file's audio spectrum in two zoom-capable views, a smaller overview of the entire track above a larger, more detailed graphical display. Playback controls, a timer with hundredths of seconds, and sliders for altering the view, zooming, and other functions ring the main view, while a toolbar gives access to noise reduction tools; speed and pitch settings; echo, reverb, and other effects; plug-ins; and other tools. Clicking the Play button played our audio track, with a moving red line tracking the output on the spectral graph. This made it ultra-simple not only to divide tracks manually but also to identify and remove artifacts like clicks and pops, copy specific passages, and remove lead-in and lead-out tracks. The zoom feature let us expand any section of the spectra for pinpoint editing, such as removing the all-too-audible "pop" and "thunk" as the stylus hits the record groove and the turntable's dust cover comes down at the beginning of a session converting analog LPs to digital music files. WavePad has some interesting and useful extras, too, such as a tone generator, batch converter, and text-to-speech tool.