WaveSmith

An audio editor inspired by programs like GoldWave for Windows and Amadeus Pro on the Mac — run it entirely by keyboard, touch, and announcements. New in 1.16, it also takes editing gestures right on the waveform: the swipe area, built to work even with a screen reader running.

Why it exists — what it solves

I built WaveSmith to edit a real weekly podcast without sight. Mainstream audio editors are waveform pictures you drag with a mouse — a dead end if you can't see the waveform. WaveSmith is inspired by programs like GoldWave for Windows and Amadeus Pro on the Mac — the same transport, selection, and effects approach — but every action has a key, every state is announced, and the status bar tells you where you are in words.

• Keyboard, touch, and announcements: selection and transport entirely by keyboard — real menus on Alt, no modifier to hold down — with touch controls and spoken status alongside.
• Real effects: including a one-step Radio processing preset and a spectral denoiser for cleaning up speech.
• Normalize: one command brings a too-quiet recording up to level — it finds the loudest peak across the part you're working on and raises everything evenly until that peak reaches full scale, so the volume comes back without the balance changing.
• Recording built in: pick your input device, hear countdown beeps, and record straight into the editor.
• Exports to WAV, MP3, and M4A — MP3 for podcasts and stations, WAV when the next tool in the chain wants the audio untouched, M4A when file size matters more.
• Tabs, redo, reverse, and sharing: several documents open at once in tabs; undo and redo; a Reverse effect that flips a selection end for end; deletions that ask first, with a preview of exactly what would go; and a place in Android's share sheet, so audio from other apps opens straight into WaveSmith. Tags live in the File menu, on Ctrl+I.

Not just for podcasts

WaveSmith earns its keep on a podcast every week, but it was never only a podcast tool. If it makes sound, WaveSmith can shape it: station IDs, promos, and spots for radio work, voice tracks, announcements — anything you'd open a desktop editor for. Cut it, process it, export it, done.

Your audio goes nowhere

Plainly: your audio never goes anywhere. The app sends nothing anywhere — no uploads, no cloud processing, no phoning home. When you save or export, the file goes only where you put it. If you save it to Google Drive, that's because you chose Drive as the place — WaveSmith just hands the file to the folder you picked, same as saving it on the device.

About the name

Same smith idea as WordSmith — this one works sound waves instead of words. Raw audio goes in; a finished, shaped piece of audio comes out.

The shortest version of what WaveSmith is, the way I put it to fellow blind users on AppleVis:

There's no need to be constantly holding down a modifier. Arrows work, Alt works — you can almost forget you're on Android when you're driving this thing from a keyboard. But on touch it's like the Android apps we know and love. So, like, if a Windows program and an Android app happened to love each other very very much, and well, ya know. lol

The swipe area — new in 1.16

WaveSmith can take the waveform's touches raw, under any screen reader, so you can edit by gesture right on the waveform — stopped or playing, no script needed. It works because WaveSmith carries a small touch service of its own: switch on WaveSmith touch service once in Android's accessibility settings, and the service sets part of the waveform aside so gestures reach the app instead of being read as screen-reader navigation — the rest of the waveform stays ordinary screen-reader territory. If the service isn't on while a reader is running, the app offers to walk you to the setting — Android makes enabling a sideloaded app's service a bit of a chore, and the app says so up front and shows the steps.

The gestures, briefly: one finger flicks to skip by the current step and to zoom. Two fingers swipe to the start or end of the file, set the selection's start and finish at the place playback paused, and double-tap to play or pause. Three fingers swipe to copy, paste, undo, and redo; hold all three still to select everything; double-tap to delete the selection, with a confirmation that can play you exactly what would go. Small swipes are enough — the area is compact on purpose. Short tones mark a touch landing in the area and crossing its edges, so the rectangle can be learned by ear; they are interface sounds only, and they never end up in a recording or an export. And a drag that runs off the waveform's edge is read as leaving, not editing — anything it brushed is put back.

The swipe-area idea is Aaron Hewitt's — Aaron Hewitt, the developer behind the SandFly screen reader these apps are built around. Thank you, Aaron Hewitt.

New in 1.17.1: a proper seat for the mouse

A small release that shows our sighted friends some love: the mouse gets a proper seat at the waveform, and the menu bar tidies itself for the setups that never needed one of its menus.

Right-click the waveform

With a mouse paired or plugged in, a right-click on the waveform opens a menu of the selection actions at that spot — the desktop editors' way (GoldWave's waveform menu has worked like this for years). Set selection start here and Set selection end here write the markers where you clicked, not at the cursor, and Select all is there too. With a selection standing, the menu adds Copy, Cut, and Delete selection — Delete asks first, confirmation and preview included, exactly as it does from the keyboard — and Paste here, which pastes at the clicked spot while the clipboard holds something. Every entry is the same command its keyboard twin runs. On an empty document there is nothing to point at, and the right-click simply does nothing.

Also new since 1.16.2: what 1.17 brought

Version 1.17 landed between the last refresh of this page and this one, and two of its changes are worth naming here. A tap on the waveform now only arms the swipe area — one finger or two, a tap moves nothing, so your place in the audio is never lost to a stray touch; the two-finger double-tap still plays and pauses. And WaveSmith now picks and saves through the same single doors as the rest of the family: one Browse door and one Save door, both walking through File Explorer's picker when it's installed — whose picker reaches Google Drive, too — and falling back to the system picker when it isn't.

The Tabs menu keeps reader hours

The menu bar's Tabs item now shows only while a screen reader is running — the world where the tab strip steps aside and the documents live in that menu. With no reader running, the strip is on screen doing that job, and the menu bar is one item shorter: File, Edit, Effects, Options, Help. Start or stop a reader and the bar follows on the spot. The Tabs menu itself — the list, the switching, the per-row Close — is unchanged, and so is every keyboard road to the documents.

An honest note about the swipe area

Plainly, because this page doesn't hide its rough edges: through the 1.16 releases, on some setups there were issues getting the swipe area to engage — the first engagement on a cold start could wobble before it settled. Version 1.17 rebuilt the tap and engagement rules from those field reports — a tap now only arms the area and never moves your place, and the two-finger double-tap re-asserts the area on the spot — and in the field that settled it: the swipe area engages, stays engaged, and gesture editing feels finished. One small thing from 1.17 does persist, and it's cosmetic: switching away with Alt+Tab can still announce the menu bar on the way out on some devices. It changes nothing about where you land or what greets you on return, and it stands accepted as an annoyance rather than a defect. If the area ever misbehaves on your device, please send a bug report from inside the app — it's in the Help menu — because the diagnostics it attaches are exactly what pins these things down.

Verify your download

After downloading, check the file's checksum against the one published here. If they match, your file is exactly the file that was released — unaltered in transit.

Permissions, explained

Documentation

Press Alt+H in the app for Help — Documentation, What's new, and Check for updates. The essentials:

• Transport and selection keys drive playback and mark out the section you want to cut, copy, or process — the status bar announces your position and selection as you go.
• Effects live in one list, including the Radio preset (one step to broadcast-ready voice) and the spectral denoiser.
• Recording flow: choose your device, start recording, and listen for the countdown beeps so you never clip your own first word.
• The swipe area has its own Help topic in the app — the complete gesture list, what the tones mean, and the steps for turning the touch service on.
• A magic-tap (two-finger double-tap) plays and pauses, for quick touch control mid-edit.

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