Computer Audio-Editing software?

[Tard]

Yeah, I posted the same thing earlier on David Hess's board. But except for very few people, don't see the crouds on each co-mingling.
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Have a reason for asking, but not really up for telling the whole story right now. In a nutshell; made a LOT of recordings in the early/mid 90's. A college buddy currently works in a TV FX studio in LA, and copied hours of those old 8-tracks to CDs. The audio quality is pretty bad.
Rather than re-recording all that material again, is there a computer program anyone would recommend for clean-up?

The CD's have been copied to this PC as both .WAV and .MP3 files, I just need an audio-editing program to tweak the volume (recording volume was low, so need to boost volume with a noise-gate), quality (definitely needs a good equalizer, possibly with a stereo-emulator (some of the stereo-tracks sound awfully mono now)), and many different tracks were copied together (in one instance, 6 seperate songs were recorded back-to-back as a single 487Mb song, one giant 48-minute monster(!!!) Totally unmanagable size).

Is there anything available (program-wise) for a desktop computer that the professional musicians here would recommend?

PS - When saying "8-Tracks" above, mean 1/2" Reel-To-Reel 8-Track recording tape, not the obsolete predecessor to cassettes.

I've used an early version of CoolEdit before (it was easy to learn & very powerful), so hoping to find a copy of "CoolEdit Pro" somewhere, but if there is a better audio-editing program available somewhere, would like to hear anyones recommendations.

[rocketmaster]

Hi Reved,
The industry's most popular program is called Pro Tools. I know there's freebie limited editions floating around because we have one in the office - unfortunately our copy is for Mac only, so I can't send it to you. You're looking for "Mastering" software, by the way. There's plenty of other brands out there...a quick Google search of "audio mastering software" free download yielded tons of results.
Good luck!
Rocky

[Tard]

Actually, I take darned good care of my CD's, so hoping it'll be YEARS before these need re-copying.

But now they're on CD, am having quite a bit'o fun just totally messing around on the 'puter, editing & adding effects & scr ewing the be-jeezus outa them!! Completely burned-thru the GoldWave trial edition in about 6-hours!

Oh, nevermind about my mention of CoolEdit Pro above. It's been bought by Adobe, who renamed it Adobe Audition 1.5, and has been rewritten to an OS this computer can't read.