10 Best Audio Editing Software for Mac of 2026

Logic Pro is the most complete audio app Apple sells, and it covers music, voice and podcast editing in one place. Apple lists Stem Splitter, which separates a mixed recording into drums, bass, vocals, guitar, piano and other parts, plus Mastering Assistant for release-ready loudness and Flex Pitch for correcting a vocal without recording it again. Multitrack podcasts benefit from take folders, Quick Swipe Comping and a full mixer with automation and routing. Pricing changed in 2026: Logic Pro is part of Apple Creator Studio at $12.99 per month or $129 per year after a 30-day trial, and it is still sold on its own for $199.99 on the Mac App Store. The trade-offs are real. Logic Pro runs only on Mac and iPad, the full Sound Library needs 44 GB or more of disk space, and spoken-word users get no transcript editing, so a Descript or Hindenburg PRO workflow is faster for interview shows.

Audacity is the free default for audio editing on a Mac. The Audacity team states it has always been and will always remain free, and the code is open source. Version 4.0.2 brings an updated interface and Workspaces, and the app covers recording, cutting, fades, effects and export to WAV, MP3, FLAC and Ogg. For voice work, the OpenVINO AI plugins, which reached macOS in 2025, add noise suppression and transcription, and the spectrogram view helps find hums and clicks by eye. Musicians can load VST3 and Nyquist plug-ins but will not find instruments, drummers or loops. The download page steers people to MuseHub first, which adds extra sound packs; there is a separate link to download Audacity without it. Audio.com, the online companion, handles backups and sharing if you want them. For a podcaster editing one or two voices, Audacity does nearly everything a paid editor does, but songwriting and transcript editing belong to other tools on this list.

REAPER gives Mac users a full digital audio workstation for a one-time $60 discounted license, which Cockos allows for personal use, for businesses with yearly gross revenue under $20,000, and for schools and non-profits. Everyone else pays $225. Cockos says there is a single version with no artificial limits: unlimited tracks, sends and effects, 64-bit internal processing, and support for VST, VST3, AU, CLAP and LV2 plug-ins. Version 7 added Track Lanes and Swipe Comping, which help podcasters assemble the best parts of several takes, and FX Containers for reusable effect chains. A license covers free updates through version 8.99, and the 60-day evaluation is fully featured. REAPER is the most flexible editor on this list, but that flexibility has a cost: it ships with no instrument library or loops, and its menus and preferences take longer to learn than GarageBand or Fission. Expect to spend time on setup before your first episode.

Descript turns editing into document work: you delete a sentence from the transcript and the audio follows. For podcasts and voiceover, that is the fastest way to cut a long interview on a Mac. The Hobbyist plan costs $16 per person per month billed annually, or $24 monthly, and includes 10 media hours, 400 AI credits and watermark-free 1080p export. Tools aimed at spoken word include Studio Sound for cleaning a voice, Remove Filler Words, Shorten Word Gaps and transcription in 25 languages. The free plan gives 60 media minutes a month, which is enough to judge the workflow. When a show needs a detailed music mix, paid plans export the timeline to Logic, Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, Final Cut Pro or REAPER. Limits matter here: Descript is subscription only, media hours cap your monthly volume, and the desktop app requires macOS 14 Sonoma or newer. Musicians will find it a poor fit.

GarageBand comes from Apple at no cost on the Mac App Store, and it is the easiest way to start recording on a Mac. Songs can hold up to 255 tracks, Drummer adds one of 33 virtual players that respond to simple controls, and Amp Designer and Pedalboard model 25 amps and 35 stompbox effects for guitarists. Flex Time and multi-take recording help tidy a performance, and iCloud moves projects between GarageBand on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Podcasters can use it for simple multitrack shows, since it records several inputs and handles basic EQ and compression. What it lacks is depth for spoken word: there is no spectral repair, no transcript editing and limited routing. The upgrade path is smooth, because GarageBand projects open in Logic Pro, so learning it is not wasted time. For a beginner or a hobby show, GarageBand is free and well documented by Apple, but serious mixing calls for Logic Pro or REAPER.

ocenaudio is a free audio editor for people who need to open a file, fix it and export it without learning a workstation. Version 3.22.2 ships as a universal download for Intel and Apple silicon Macs running macOS 14.4 or later. Its most useful feature for voice work is multi-selection: you can select several separate passages, such as every answer in an interview, and normalize or filter them in one step. Effects, including VST plug-ins, preview in real time while you move the controls, and the developers say common edits stay near instant even on files several hours long. A spectrogram view helps spot noise. The limits are clear: ocenaudio edits one file at a time with no multitrack mixing, and it has no AI cleanup or transcript tools. For trimming voiceover takes, cleaning lecture recordings or preparing samples, it is faster to open and simpler to use than Audacity.

TwistedWave is a Mac-first audio editor aimed at recording, mastering and batch work, and it fits voiceover and audiobook production well. Its speech recognition feature syncs a recording with a text script: select words and TwistedWave selects the matching audio, which speeds up pickups and corrections in long narration. A built-in silence detector splits a file into named parts, and the batch engine applies Audio Unit or VST effects, sample rate changes and format conversion across whole folder hierarchies. Pitch and speed changes use ZTX technology licensed from Zynaptiq. It runs natively on Apple silicon from macOS 10.15 through macOS Tahoe 26 and supports audio up to 32-bit and 192 kHz. TwistedWave edits single files rather than multitrack sessions, so it is not a tool for mixing a music project or a multi-host show. The 30-day demo is fully functional, and a 90-day money-back guarantee applies; the USD price was not visible from our location, so check the order page.

Fission does a small set of jobs well: trimming, cropping, joining, fading and converting audio files on a Mac without the quality loss that re-encoding causes. Rogue Amoeba says it edits MP3 and AAC losslessly, which matters when you are cutting ads or dead air from a finished episode. Podcasters can add chapter markers to AAC and MP3 files, and Smart Split breaks long recordings into parts at silences. The batch converter exports to MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, FLAC, AIFF and WAV. Version 2.9.5 supports macOS 14 to 27, and a $35 license covers one user on all of their personally owned Macs. Fission is not a multitrack editor and has no noise reduction or mixing, so it works best alongside a recorder such as Audio Hijack or a DAW. The trial applies limitations, so test it before buying. For quick fixes on finished files, few apps on the Mac are faster to learn.

Hindenburg PRO is designed for people who cut interviews into stories, and the vendor positions it against music-focused DAWs. Version 2 adds editing by transcript: offline transcription in 99 languages lets you search hours of tape and rough-cut in text or audio. Clipboards with groups, subgroups and favorites keep interviews, ambience and music organized in long documentaries. On import, Hindenburg converts files to high-quality WAV and sets broadcast-ready levels, and on export it publishes to several loudness targets and produces a music usage report. Plans are Standard, Plus and Premium, with 0, 20 and 50 transcription hours a month, sold monthly, yearly or as a perpetual license. On a Mac it needs Apple silicon M1 or newer and macOS 13 through macOS 27, and it loads AU plug-ins. Prices showed only in Polish zloty from our location, so check the US price on the vendor site. Musicians will find little here.

iZotope RX is the repair tool many audio editors reach for when a recording has problems that ordinary EQ and noise gates cannot fix. RX 12 Advanced bundles more than 50 tools in a standalone editor plus AU, VST3, AAX and ARA plug-ins, so Mac users can run it on its own or inside Logic Pro and other hosts. Spectral Repair lets you paint out dog barks, string squeaks and sirens in the spectrogram, Dialogue Isolate separates voice from background noise, and Repair Assistant proposes fixes you can adjust. RX 12 adds Scene Rebalance, Stems View and a Trim Silence module for long files. For podcasters and voiceover artists recording in untreated rooms, these tools can rescue takes that would otherwise be re-recorded. RX is not a place to build an episode or a song, though; it fixes audio that you then edit elsewhere. The page showed only euro prices from our location, so check the US price and the lower editions on the vendor site.