( Alternatives )
An Audacity alternative that edits by text
Audacity earned its place: free, offline, and it can do almost anything to a waveform — if you know where to cut, by ear, one scrub at a time. Cast trades that generality for speed on one job: a podcast episode, edited by reading it, finished at the loudness your platform expects.
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At a glance
| Audacity | Cast | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, forever, open source | Free plan is a whole workflow; paid adds quality + license |
| Editing model | Waveform, by ear | Transcript — you read the cut before you make it |
| Destructive? | Edits bake in (undo history ends) | Never overwritten; restore any cut, even after export |
| Fillers & pauses | Find them yourself, cut by hand | Listed, counted, cut in one click, snapped to quiet points |
| Music | Import a file, draw the envelope | Generated per episode, ducks itself under the voice |
| Loudness | Plugins and know-how | Pick the platform; −14/−16/−23 ships with the preset |
| Works offline | Yes | No — Cast runs in the browser |
Keep Audacity for what a DAW is for
Multitrack recording rigs, restoration work, plugin chains, editing with no internet in a field — Audacity does things Cast never will, at a price Cast cannot match. If you already move fast in it, nothing here says switch.
The afternoon you get back
“I edit my podcast in Audacity” usually means: scrub, listen, guess, cut, listen again — for every filler word, every long pause, an hour of tape at a time. Cast’s version of that afternoon is a list: every “um” counted per speaker, every silence over your threshold, each cut snapped to a quiet point and reversible. You read the episode and delete the parts that shouldn’t be there.
And the finish line moves closer: music generated for the episode ducks itself under the voice, and the export lands at Spotify’s or Apple’s loudness without you ever seeing a LUFS meter.
- Read the cut before you make it
- Fillers and dead air, listed
- Nothing bakes in — ever
- Loudness handled by preset
FAQ
01What can I do in the transcript editor?
Select any run of words in the Voice Editor and a menu appears. You can delete them (the audio is cut and the gap closes), ignore them (the audio is muted, the timing stays), correct the wording, mark a chapter, assign a speaker, or copy and paste words elsewhere.
Read more →02What does non-destructive actually mean?
It means your edits are stored as instructions layered over the original recording, which is never overwritten. The practical consequence: any cut can be undone at any time, including one you made weeks ago, and including after you have exported.
Read more →03What is the Free plan good for?
Editing is never metered and never watermarked: transcription, filler and pause removal, noise removal, captions and audio export cost zero credits on every plan, including Free. Credits buy generation (music and SFX) and the AI first pass beyond your first free one; the uploads allowance caps how much audio you bring in. Free: 100 credits, 60 min, MP3 128k, exports up to 10 minutes. Lite: 700, 10 hrs, 2 GiB storage, MP3 320k. Plus: 2,750, 25 hrs, WAV, commercial license. Max: 6,500, unlimited, broadcast (EBU R128), stems.
Read more →04What loudness will my export have?
Apple Podcasts wants −16 LUFS; Spotify and YouTube want −14 LUFS; broadcast (EBU R128) wants −23 LUFS. Most tools make you type that number in. Cast ships the target with the platform — pick where you are publishing and it normalizes to that, with true peak at −1 dB. (Master is the exception: no normalization, no ceiling — untouched on purpose.)
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