Audacity is designed as an audio editor rather than a DAW. I'd be surprised if a DAW like Ardour had destructive editing, spectral analysis, or sample-level wav

Audacity is designed as an audio editor rather than a DAW. I'd be surprised if a DAW like Ardour had destructive editing, spectral analysis, or sample-level waveform view. From the UI perspective, I don't know if it has the ability to "open" an audio file and turn it into a single-file project, or if you can disable tempo sand best-based timings altogether (since podcasts and such lack a concept of tempo).