Since Audacity was developed and launched by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg in May of 2000, the program has remained a strong bastion of quality freeware, despite ample opportunity to sell out and begin charging customers for usage.

Although lacking some of the high-end features of expensive recording software, Audacity comes loaded with a wide array of features and can easily be augmented to include a seemingly endless assortment of VST effects.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of Audacity is how easy it is to understand. The overall interface is so intuitive that most beginners won’t even need instructions to begin working. With Audacity’s simple and effective design, the oftentimes complicating tasks of importing, exporting, virtual audio streaming, batch conversion, special effects, multi-tracking and mastering are only a few clicks away.

Furthermore, Audacity supports WAV, AIFF, AU, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG audio, MP2, MP3, AC3, M4A and WMA sound formats and makes conversion between these different media formats easy and painless.

Additionally, Audacity is cross-platform compatible, so no matter if you are using a PC or a Macintosh, you can download this excellent freeware and begin editing and recording music in a matter of minutes.

Record players and radios. Before the convenience and freedom we got from Apple products, people only had radios and record players to rely on for music distribution. Record players evolved from the Thomas Edison prototype to a modern 20th century version, mostly improved turntable, needle and stylus.

Eight-track player. Eight-tracks grew increasingly popular from the 1960s on through the 1980s in the United States, thanks to Ford including an eight-track player in its Mustangs . Eight-track tapes could hold around 45 minutes of music, and was the premier technology for cassette tapes.

Portable CD player. Believe it or not, the first portable CD player was developed as early as 1984. Early versions were susceptible to CDs skipping, which was mostly rectified by the time CD players were commercially huge in the 90s. Portable CD players were all the rage, as were huge books to hold all of your CDs, since only one could play at a time.

iPod. Skip ahead to the iPod, which was released back in 2001 and is still going strong thanks to the minds and innovation at Apple. iPods have gotten smaller while the amount of music the hold has grown immensely. iPods wouldn’t be what they are without iTunes, which in itself has changed the music industry forever. Instead of pirating music, you can quickly download individual songs and albums straight to iTunes to upload to your iPod.

iPhone. The first iPhone was released in 2007, and has now become part smartphone part iPod. Now iPhone users can just use their phones to listen to music instead of having to tote around an iPhone and an iPod.

As people continue to get smarter, so will the technology we use to listen to music, whether it’s more online radio streaming services like Pandora or hybrid online platforms like Spotify.