Editing programs recommendations?

Is there any program you could recommend for editing music. Mostly what I do is fade in or fade out after downloading from my CD's so it works better if I listen to the songs isolated from the rest of the album (in the cases of songs that have no pause between them). Sometimes I may want to paste them or so. Very simple things, actually, but the program I have been using (it's from Nero, actually) often adds a slight pause that sounds like a click at the part where the fade begins, or where the two tracks are pasted togheter, when I'm using MP3 or AAC (I think it would work just fine with WAV, though).

Thanks a lot, I'll check it out.

Davesax1965 wrote: Audacity is good for sound manipulation. I use it as a plugin for Reaper - www.reaper.fm  Fade in / fade out is really best done in a DAW environment, ie. Reaper/ Cubase. Expensive. Steep learning curve.

No, I really just want to do the most simple things. Just as long as I can do them in MP3 and AAC. Otherwise I can rip the songs in WAV, do whatever I want to do, and convert to a compressed one... but if I can skip that it's much better. By the way, I couldn't open AAC with Audacity, but it seems I can open MP3... yet there was something about only saving a project, but not changing the file. Still, I'll just try it out. However, if anyone wants to talk more complicated stuff on the thread, well, once a thread has been started, it usually ends up out of control of the OP and everyone just talk about what they are interested in (hopefully, at least related to the topic).

One that I've been using since 2000 is GoldWave (costs $45; back in 2000 I think it was around $30). But like everyone else has said, Audacity is free. I have used Audacity off and on (mostly for transferring old cassettes into .wav format) but tend to use GoldWave because I've been using it for so long and some days I'm too grumpy to learn something new.