audio editing software for windows

You might want to give GoldWave a try. It is a popular choice amongst NVDA users on Windows, and NVDA even has an add-on to make it even more user-friendly. Links below.

GoldWave:
https://goldwave.com/

GoldWave Add-on:
https://addons.nvda-project.org/addons/goldwave.en.html

Note: I do not use this software personally, I just know of its existence, and that it is reportedly very accessible with NVDA.

HTH.

I used Gold Wave for years and years. It adapts itself to screen reader mode. When I used it, there wasn't an add-on and it was still great. Simple. Limited to editing a single track, but basic editing is great.
Reaper has a steeper learning curve and does essentially everything anyone has ever thought about doing in an audio editor. It's crazy. Jamie Tate has written the OSARA Reaper plugin to make the app very accessible, including a key to provide an accessible standardize set of controls for audio plugins (the Mac version doesn't have this). Garth Humphreys did a great series of podcasts about using Reaper with a screen reader, and there's a "Reaper without peepers" user forum.
The fundamental advantage of Reaper is that it's a multi-track editor. So, for instance, background music on a different track, edited independently. You can even chop up video in one track and do the music or whatever in another. In GoldWave, once you've mixed in the music, it's there in the single file, end of story. I did it, though, and enjoyed doing it.
Also, I may be misremembering GoldWave's limitations: it's been quite a few years.
Also: reaper is non-destructive. Everything is done with an editing decision list (EDL). Basically, all the commands you do to the file. The source files are not modified, and everything can be undone.
The GoldWave manual actually has a lot of good info on audio editing as it explains all its functions, so that's a great place to learn.

I too chose to dive into audio editing, and after chatting with a friend of mine who does this for a living, he suggested Reaper and I've been using it ever since.

It's true that it does take some getting use to, but if you have the Osara plugin, plus the SWS plugin, you can learn to use it too.

You can also use it with JAWS, but would recommend you get the JAWS scripts for Reaper from Snowman.

I would also recommend you check out the "Reapers without Peepers" Google group page at https://groups.io/g/rwp.

After using a number of audio editing programs, I would recommend either Audacity or Reaper.

Audacity is free and open source. They put a lot of work into making it screen reader friendly with lots of useful hotkeys. Audacity also supports multi-track editing. It comes with lots of useful plug-ins for things like compression, revereb, etc., etc. You can also import other plug-ins that you find on the net. There are also screen-reader specific instructions for using Audacity if you search for them on the web.

Reaper is a commercial audio editing program that supports a very extensive range of functions for editing multi-track audio. It is used by many professionals both blind and sighted. Amazingly, it only cost about $60. Reaper also comes with a number of free plug-ins for compression, reverb, delay, etc., and many more are available from free libraries that are easy to import as well as other places. As mentioned, Reaper has been made very accessible for both Macs and PCs if you install the Osara program. If you use JAWS, you should definitely install the Snowman's scripts. The Reapers Without Peepers e-mail forum is a great site for getting advice from other blind users. The only issue with Reaper is that, since there are so many built-in functions and actions, it can be a steep learning curve. Its UI paradigm can also be a bit tricky for beginners. Fortunately there are sdtep by step guides you can find on the Reaper's Without Peepers forum that can quickly get a beginner going on simple tasks. I use Reaper for editing the Eyes On Success podcast.

The other option worth considering if you only want to do podcast is the Studio Recorder program from APH. Although this costs about $200 last time I checked, it is an extremely easy program to use and was made specifically for use with screen readers. This is the program that many people use to produce talking books. 'the downside, besides the price, is that it only works for a single mono or stereo track.

Anyway, I hope those explanations help. good luck with your podcast!

--Pete

I second the recommendation for goldwave. Fantastic program. I also have Studio Recorder, and it's a good program, but you can do more in Goldwave. If you don't actually need multitrack, then it will more than do the job.

Reaper does everything you'd need and more.

I haven't used Audacity that much but Reaper has its own drawbacks, including the fact that non-destructive means that you have to work with projects rather than the source material itself, which -in turn- means that you have to render/export the output file every time you make a change. In GoldWave, however, you use standard Windows commands to open a file, and simple operations like "select all", "cut", "copy" and "paste". You then hit Ctrl+S and done!

No, you don't have to export every time you make a change. You have to export if you want a final version.

Suppose you have a project called podcast. To keep it simple, this project is a single track. In Goldwave, you save it, then you decide, oh I wanted some echo on my voice. So you do that and then save it again. But now, that track just has echo on your voice, you can't do anything about it if you decide you want it removed or want more or less echo.

Now, we do the same thing in Reaper, you record into your project named podcast, and save it. Now somewhere there's a wav file, probably named with a string of gibberish, associated with your podcast project. If you apply echo and save that project, that wave file is unchanged. So if you load your project again and want to get rid of the echo, or make it more or less echo, no problem, you just change the settings on the plugin you've added.

When you've got Podcast the way you want it, in both cases, you want to save again. Now, in Reaper, yes, you need to export, Reaper calls it rendering. So when you go, "OK, I did my podcast on chicken nuggets, so I want Food Rager - Episode 3 - The Chicken Nugget Crisis, you have to render your project to that filename and with whatever settings you want. In essence, it would be like if you wanted to save your project as an mp3 file instead of a wav file in Goldwave.

In other words, rendering is the final step of the project. The only reason you'd need to render multiple times is if you wanted to hear it somewhere else, on other speakers, and you wanted to hear the version with echo and the version without echo, to compare them.

Then, yes, you'd be exporting multiple times. But generally speaking, you only need to export when you want a mix to take somewhere else, whether that's the final version you're going to upload somewhere or make an mp3 of or whatever, or whether you want to compare different versions of your project on another system and you need audio files to play.