GoldWave

GoldWave is one of the oldest commercial audio editors still in active development, and it has a long-standing presence in EVP investigation communities — partly because it was the accessible Windows alternative to expensive professional tools in the early 2000s when many EVP researchers first adopted digital workflows. It handles multi-file workflows particularly well: open multiple recordings side by side and switch between them for comparison.

GoldWave's batch processing (under the Batch Processing menu) can apply noise reduction, normalisation, and format conversion to hundreds of recordings in a single unattended run. This is useful for pre-processing a full investigation's worth of recordings to a consistent standard before individual review. The built-in spectral view (activated via the View menu) provides a reasonable spectrogram for basic EVP analysis.

GoldWave's perpetual licence ($59) with free updates for the major version makes it more affordable than some subscription alternatives. The Expression Evaluator allows custom DSP formulas — advanced users have written EVP-specific filters for the community. GoldWave is Windows-only and does not match the analytical depth of Audacity + Sonic Visualiser, but it is a solid, straightforward tool that has served EVP investigators reliably for over two decades.