( 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.
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); the uploads allowance caps how much audio you bring in. Free: 100 credits, 60 min, MP3 128k. Lite: 700, 10 hrs, MP3 320k. Plus: 2,750, 25 hrs, WAV, stems, commercial license. Max: 6,500, unlimited, broadcast (EBU R128).
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.)
Read more →