Wavosaur

Wavosaur is a portable single-track audio recorder and editor for Windows. The whole program is a single executable that runs from a USB stick, which makes it useful for recording on machines where you can’t install software. It supports VST plugins, batch processing, loop editing, and the kind of bit-perfect editing tasks that audio professionals occasionally need. Development has slowed significantly in recent years (the most recent stable build is from 2020), but it still runs fine on modern Windows and remains a solid lightweight option.

There’s no macOS or Linux version. Mac users should use Audacity or Ocenaudio instead. For a full breakdown of how Wavosaur compares to Audacity and Ocenaudio, our free audio editors page goes into more detail.