Audacity
 

Brian's request for Roberto-sounds this past weekend made me think of this program (Audacity) and I thought I should pass it along.
Audacity is a free program that is available for download (and I have nothing to do with it, other than being an occasional user). It is an in-depth audio editor. Best of all, it can record anything that goes through your soundcard, if you set that as the input source. This means that if, for example, some crazy internet cartoonist puts out a call for sounds from a television show, it is a simple matter to get the audio off the dvd by simply playing the dvd while Audacity records it exactly as the soundcard plays it. After which, Audacity is capable of doing just about anything you might want: amplification (it can auto-amplify to the maximum level before you start chopping, or you can set a custom dB level), trimming, fancy effects like pitch shifting/speed shifting w/o pitch shifting/doing both at once, and so on. If anyone is into this sort of thing, but is on a budget, this would definitely be worth checking out. It will work with pretty much all popular file formats, although you do have download dll's for some of them separately (these are also available, just not packaged with the main install).

It looked nice but it wasn't very easy to use in my opinion. I'm using sonic foundry's Sound Forge for most of my music editing needs, but I might check out Audacity once more and try to learn it's arcane magicks.

It is certainly not the easiest & probably not the best, but definitely among the cheapest:).
Seriously, though, once you work through its rather non-intuitive interface, it is pretty powerful. Though I would be willing to bet Sound Forge does a lot more. I just don't care to actually pay money for a sound edit program.

There was a long list of things I thought this thread would be about.

This was not one of them.

A link to Audacity since no one bothered to do that for some reason, and because www.Audacity.com is some random business's page that pretty much just says "No, we didn't make Audacity the sound editor, go away."

I've never found Audacity very hard to use, but that's probably because I tried Goldwave first. Great tool for all your random-screwing-around-with-audio needs. Plus it's free, unlike pretty much everything else.

Now I'm curious...and slightly fearful.

Read my signature, and then understand that I treat those words as a sort of guideline for how I act.

I should probably rename tech support to like "computers and technology" so it covers stuff like this. I'll get around to it later.

Long as we're talking about dicking around with audio, Audacity is a great value considering it's actually free. Don't forget the plug-ins though.

And if you're looking for a multi-track DAW for the same price and value, then Reaper works quite nice. You can evaluate it indefinitely at full-functionality.

What I'm really looking for in an audio program is something that isolates channels, and does it at a near-professional level.

You mean like Audacity/Soundforge does? Most finished songs have only 2 channels.

Or could you possibly be confusing channels with tracks?