A very popular audio recording and editing tool in use today is Audacity. It is a free download from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.

This is the main window of Audacity. The Tool Bar and Menu Bar offer a variety of different tools to allow you to record and then edit the resulting audio file. Note that the sample here shows an audio file that has been recorded in stereo. The edited file can be exported as a wav or mp3 file format, just to name a few.