Audacity 4 moves the whole interface onto Qt, replaces the tool modes with context aware clip editing, adds grouped clips and three workspaces, and stores projects in a new aup4 format. The 4.0.1 patch brought back export multiple and a portable Windows build.

After six quiet years LMMS shipped 1.3.0-alpha.2 in September 2026: 932 commits, 65 contributors and 8 new plugins, plus microtonal tuning, detachable windows and ARM64 builds. The stable release is still the one from July 2020.

XSplit Broadcaster puts scenes, sources, preview, audio and output in one workspace. The free tier allows 720p with no watermark, and a subscription opens resolution, frame rate, AI features and commercial use.

Ardour 9.8 brings keys and scales into this open source digital audio workstation: notes outside the scale are marked in the piano roll and may be corrected per track. A crash during recording now recovers what was captured, losing at most five seconds.

A Windows program that puts screen capture, recording, image editing and colour measuring into one toolbox, updated to 7.6.1 in September 2026 with pause and picture-in-picture camera added to recording, and free for personal and non-commercial use.

Flameshot is an open source cross platform capture tool that lets you draw arrows, blur sensitive areas and drop text on the image right after the selection is made, with a rearranged toolbar, editable hotkeys and a command line interface for scripted captures.

A free streaming and recording program built on OBS, with scene templates, subscription alerts, chat management and product picks in one window, so a newcomer can go live without studying encoding parameters first.

A free Windows media player from Kakao in Korea with the decoder built in, so common formats play without a codec pack, plus DXVA, CUDA and QuickSync hardware acceleration and SRT and ASS subtitle styling. Stable version 1.7.23121 is the first with a native ARM64 build.

From the ArtCraft team, an open source non linear video editor written from scratch in Rust: H.264, HEVC and ProRes codecs, the timeline, grading, audio and subtitles are all implemented in house.

A timeline that behaves the way a beginner expects, a stock library that is ready when you open it, and automatic voiceover, background removal and recording: an editor you can finish something with before you learn it.

Written by a working French editor, it puts presets for beginners and full encoder parameters for professionals in the same window: convert, compress, extract audio and burn subtitles without opening a second tool.

The successor to a much loved viewer keeps the two rules that mattered: open instantly and be pleasant to page through. Archives read without extracting, and comic reading modes are built in.

OpenShot is the editing program you can hand to someone who has never cut a video: drag clips onto a timeline, drop a transition, add keyframes from a right click. Free, open source and without watermarks.

For a tutorial, a bug report or a quick demonstration, one animation beats ten screenshots. Most recorders turn that into a project, a timeline and an export step. LICEcap leaves a draggable frame and a record button.

Traditional live streams arrive seconds behind reality, which is why the neighbour cheers before your phone shows the goal. Ant Media Server pushes WebRTC playback down to roughly half a second and covers ingest, transcoding and multi protocol delivery in one chain. Version 3.1 adds NDI sources, SRT with language tags and a new console.