ocenaudio is an outstanding audio editor

There are hundreds of free audio editors around, and if your needs are basic -- trimming an MP3 here, maybe adjusting volume there -- then just about any of them will do.

Finding more capable editors can be a real problem, but there are a few around, and ocenaudio is a very interesting example.

The program is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and is entirely free, no adware or other hassles. Just install it and you’re ready to go in seconds.

Ocenaudio’s first plus is its extensive file support. It can handle a wide range of audio formats (regular, raw and text-based), videos, URLs, folders, playlists or archives, and you can open files individually or via drag and drop.

Whatever you’ve selected is initially displayed in a standard waveform view. But you can also switch to a spectral view, or display both, one above the other.

Navigation is generally very easy. Spinning the mouse wheel zooms in and out, while a separate pane shows where the current view is located within the file. If you want to look elsewhere, there’s none of the usual zoom full/ reselect/ zoom in again; instead you can just move your zoom window by clicking and dragging.

Basic selection is just as simple: click and drag across the waveform. But there’s more here, too. Hold down Ctrl, click/ drag/ release again and you’ll select multiple areas. Click Play and it’ll play those selections alone, optionally looping through them.

Once you’ve chosen an area then there are plenty of functions and effects to explore. You might trim, cut, copy or paste audio, apply fades, gain, normalize, filters, equalizers, delay/ flanger/ chorus/ reverb/ vibrato, compressor/ expander/ limiter/ noise gate, and the list goes on.

What’s really smart, though, is that each of these offers real-time previewing. Choose the 31-band equalizer, say, and you can leave your sample playing on a loop, then adjust each band individually, and hear the results right away.

And of course if you’ve selected multiple areas then your chosen effect will be applied to them all: a real time-saver.

This isn’t everything ocenaudio has to offer. In fact you could make a good audio tool from the features we haven’t mentioned so far: FFT analysis, sample rate conversion, swap/ extract channel operations, DTMF detection/ generation, a tag editor, iPhone ringtone creator, FTP export and more.

Put it all together and ocenaudio is an impressive audio editor, easy to use for basic operations, yet with plenty of extras on hand if you need them.