REAPER is evaluationware akin to WinZip, and much more robust than Audacity. The trial and full version are the same. You can buy apropos licenses whenever you feel the desire.
it's worth bearing in mind that comparing audacity and reaper is like comparing notepad++ to libreoffice- in many cases libreoffice is a much more robust program but in others all the extra bells and whistles are bloat. you wouldn't want to program in libreoffice!
that said audacity has some wildly bizzare design, and any forks are either even worse with this or incredibly unstable, so audacity being terrible isn't wrong sadly
I will never understand how it's the thing so many people suggest to edit audio. the UI is so obtuse and unlike every other piece of software that does the same things.
IMO Reaper is fantastic and simply a better drop-in replacement for audacity. Audacity—despite the wonderful name, second only to Alacritty (maybe the greatest program name ever)—is wildly difficult to use, buggy as all hell, and insanely inefficient. Reaper, on the other hand, works for simple things and for complex synthesizer and wacky editing stuff perfectly. I still remember how surprised and bemused I was that the Electro-Akustik department in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin uses basically-free Reaper for their recording needs.
The only argument for audacity is the slightly faster start-up time, and the absence of a "buy-me" pop-up (if you haven't purchased one of the very affordable licenses). Seriously though, since I discovered Reaper I've basically used it for everything not related to work et al. Fantastic software.
+1 for reaper. Its free to "demo" forever with no limitations and is much closer to a traditional DAW than audacity. So many plugins and scripts to customise too, such a great tool I can never recommend it enough to anyone wanting to do anything from simple audio edits/conversions to full fat tracking and mixing sessions.