Audio Editing:  

GoldWave supports a long list of editing tools and visual aides, such as waveform, spectral view, VU meter, analog meter, X-Y graph, spectrogram and a "blowing inferno."

This software has editing tools to do just about everything—batch processing, information editing, mixing, channel mixing and includes an equalizer, processor, an expression evaluator, format converter, effect chain editor and signal analysis tools. All edits are processed quickly, with a preview option and it has a handy mouse scroll zoom and right click edits.

This product has over 20 preset effects, including compressor/expander, the ability to reduce vocals, dopler, cross fading and a "time warp."

This is a good product for restoration projects, it includes a noise/silence reduction, pop/plick, smoother and FFT filters.

From what we can tell, this program can split files but does not have the ability to split tracks.

Recording/Burning:  

GoldWave can record from anything—sound card, streaming audio, CDs, video files and MIDI files. It can also record instantly whatever is playing on the sound card, which is nice.

It can work with many popular formats, including RAW, AU, AVI, Dialogic VOX, OGG Vorbis, SND and text data.

However, if you want to burn your projects onto a CD or DVD, you will need to install the burning program separately.

Ease of Use:  

This program is moderately easy to use. However, for beginning audio editors, the advanced features may be overwhelming. Nevertheless, experienced editors will enjoy the great visuals and adjustable effects and filters.

Help/Support:  

GoldWave offers exceptional help through FAQs, help pages, a product manual, tutorials as well as an online user forum and email correspondence for technical support. When we contacted technical support, they answered our questions within hours.

GoldWave is perfect for those that want to perform major audio editing and analyzing tasks, it contains excellent restoration tools and can edit large files.