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.
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).
I use Amadeus. The ones I hear about most are Sound Forge and Adobe Audition. I think you’d only use Audition if you already had a Creative Cloud subscription. I’m also aware of alternatives like WaveLab, TwistedWave, Fission, Acoustica, and ocenaudio.
ocenaudio is probably the direct competitor to Audacity, since they’re both free.
Audacity is a fine editor, but the UI isn't really consistent with platform conventions. A long time ago I learned audio stuff on cracked copies of Sound Forge, which behaved like one would expect a Windows app to behave, then switched to Audacity and hated it because the UI was so weird.
