Audacity

Audacity began in 1999 as a research project by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon and was released in 2000 under the GPL. The interface is built on wxWidgets and looks about as platform-neutral as that suggests. It is a waveform editor rather than a DAW: you cut, normalise, remove noise and export, but rarely mix forty tracks.

In 2021 the project was acquired by Muse Group, and a proposal to add telemetry set off an almost instant fork storm, Tenacity being the best known. The same year, version 3.0 replaced the old project folder of thousands of tiny files, which broke whenever someone moved it, with a single SQLite file (.aup3).