Back in the day there was a shareware program available for Windows guys called Cool Edit Pro. Despite it’s ridiculous name, it actually had a pretty solid user base.
Cool Edits strength was in audio editing and its price. Then Adobe bought it and relaunched it as Audition. Today Audition have a lot of features that’s of much more interest to musicians than podcasters, but without having forgotten about its editing heritage.
So now Adobe readies Audition 3. There are new features in version 3 that looks like “musicians features”, but there are also a couple of news under the editing roof. Besides, Audition could’ve been a good option for podcasters even before this update. It has a lot of audio editing features. Besides the “regular” things, like fading, cutting, pasting etc., it also has tools for restoration, i.e. removing noise which can be used to clean up vinyl, or in our case, crappy recordings, interviews at noisy places etc.
You can watch videos of Audition over at Adobes website if you’re interested.
I haven’t dug deep into this, but Adobes Soundbooth might be something to look into as well. There’s a comparison chart of the two here at Adobes website.
I find it very useful and user friendly for my album production. Awesome!