Now I find it hard to believe that anyone working in community radio or podcasting does not know about this very nice software tool, but that is what a blog if to share information people already know. 
Audacity is a free, open source, cross platform sound editor that is available here. Whether you are running Windows, Mac or Linux you can run Audacity.
What some people might think is Audacity's greatest weakness turns out to be it's greatest strength. Audacity does not come with a lot of bells and whistles, like a professional sound editor like Adobe Audition. On the other hand Audition costs a couple of hundred dollars and has a very steep learning curve. There is even a slight difference in the size of the programs and how much computer power you will need to run them. The trial version of Audition is about a 450 megabyte download, Audacity is a 2.5 megabyte download. Below are are screenshots of both programs.
Audacity can certainly do the job for creating radio shows and podcsts. I produce two shows for our community radio station, WNRB in Wausau Wisconsin, and have used nothing but Audacity.
Here is a nice list of the features of Audacity. But a quick overview shows that Audacity is a true multitrack recorder that allows you time shift tracks where you need them, cut and paste soundbites, import a bunch of different audio file types, export to wav, mp3 or ogg, and liven things up with special effects. A very nice Swiss Army knife of sound.
There are several online tutorials for Audacity, which give you a good idea of what the program can do and will get you up and running pretty quickly. In addition there is a forum where you can ask questions and get help from other users and a Wiki to dive deeper in to the program.
If you have ever used a sound editor before you can be up and running with Audacity in mere minutes. If you are fairly computer literate and use the online tutorials and such you can be producing audio with Audacity in a couple of hours. I have been using Audacity for several years now and in the last year have recorded over 100 hours of programming for WNRB using only Audacity. It is a solid, functional tool.
One note however. There is a new beta version which was released in November. It has many wonderful new features and the user interface is much improved. Unfortunately I had some problems exporting files in the .wav format, so I am not recommending its use, especially by beginners. Perhaps a newer version will appear soon, if so I will report on it here.
