Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni of Google, while he was a graduate student at Carnegie-Mellon University. Dominc Mazzoni is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world.

Audacity is extremely popular in the podcasting world due to its wide availability, multi-platform support, and the fact that it is free. Some of Audacity’s features are :

• Recording and playing sounds
• Importing and exporting WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and other formats.
• Multi track mixing
• Editing via Cut, Copy and Paste with unlimited undo.
• Noise removal
• Amplitude envelope editing.
• High ease of use
• Large array of plug-ins available.

You can download Audacity for your favorite platform by visiting its home page.

Here are a couple of well written tutorials on using Audacity which should get one up and running in using this fine piece of open source software :

• Audacity tutorial by Daniel James.
• Audacity Manual (Official) – Very comprehensive.
• This Audacity tutorial will help you to get up and running with the free open source audio editing program.

Finally, here is a video demonstrating how to remove vocals from MP3s using Audacity. Watch and learn….