Free Recording Software

[7704A]

Reaper here too - on linux becuase i like pain. I started with Ardour and had nothing but problems. Once you get the hang of Reaper there's no looking back.

Funny, I went the opposite direction. Tried Reaper, couldn't get it to work for me, switched to Ardour and was finally able to record stuff.

 

[SgtThump]

I still miss my pirated version of Cool Edit Pro

I paid in full for that in the late ‘90s and spent many hours with that software! Hadn’t heard that name in years.

 

[TheGreatGreen]

Was just going to post a thread asking.

I am using Reaper, but my daughter is wanting to get into recording
So I am seeing that Audacity, or Abelton Lite might be the best option for her. She has a windows machine with a fosusrite scarlet USB audio interface. It was hard for me to tell if Cakewalk had a free version.

Audacity is very simple but for what it's worth it also looks hideous if that matters to you, and imo it's almost too limited, like to the point of frustration. There's some basic functionality it needs but just doesn't have, at least that was the case when I tried it years ago.

If it was me and I wanted to setup a DAW on the Windows machine of somebody getting into recording, I'd still go with Reaper. Explain the basics to them, how to make a new track, select a source, make a starting template so all the right sources are already selected when a new session is created, then setup a few custom keybinds that make sense for your workflow like @DanTravis62 mentioned earlier in the thread, and that should be plenty fine to get pretty much anybody started.