[SyneRyder]

A long time ago Cool Edit Pro was the definitive choice on Windows. It became Adobe Audition and 'disappeared' into their Creative Cloud subscription bundle - it's still actively developed but I no longer hear of people using it.

iZotope RX is meant more for audio restoration (and is the industry standard there), but you can also use it for many audio editing tasks.

I've personally switched to Acustica by Acon Digital. The GUI isn't perfect, but it's very fast, and has an impressive audio separation tool based on Spleeter.

All those tools seem to have taken some influence from that Cool Edit Pro GUI.

[dr-smooth]

Cool Edit Pro. Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

I used to love that program for its simplicity. I will cast my vote for ocenaudio as the fastest, most intuitive audio editor for basic tasks (and it does a great job with batch jobs, too, like running the same noise reduction on 10 clips at the same time).

https://www.ocenaudio.com/