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For sampling and beat slicing I use Regroover, a plugin from Accusonus. If you are working with loops or want to extract some grooves from old vinyl samples it’s a great tool. This plugin is capable to unmix your loops into layers. You can extract kicks, claps, snares etc. Someone else tried it?
Adobe Audition (formerly cool edit pro) is what I use and would recommend however the current monthly licensing scheme is pretty terrible. I believe it costs $20/month for a single Adobe product. As an affiliated researcher with an arts focused university, I receive the full Adobe creative cloud for $15/year. . .if that option is available to you, jump on it.
Adobe Audition 3, old but still totally usable, is available as part of the old Adobe CS2, which you may be able to source from Adobe’s website. . .
Audacity is okay but doesn’t feature sample level editing which for me is a non-starter. I’m not sure what other audio editing tools out there offer sample level editing. . . probably SoundForge and WaveLab. The Audition interface seems vastly simpler, and the in-built effects are of excellent quality. I do all of my mastering with the stock Audition tools.
I was very lucky to buy Sound Forge Pro 11 and Acid Pro 7 from Humble Bundle for about 25 euros before few months. Since then it’s the only audio editor I am using. Before I enjoyed Wavosaur and worked a bit with Audacity. Reaper does a great job too but it’s overkill to use such powerful DAW for simple tasks as sample editing.
Oh snap ! What a great deal ! If I knew about about it, I wouldnt hesitate a second.
Wavosaur is fantastic and free .
Acon digital ’ acoustica ’ also seems pretty good
Standard version is only 60 .
For Mac: TwistedWave (https://twistedwave.com) - my favorite or ocenaudio (https://www.ocenaudio.com) - also for Windows and Linux.
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I know this thread is old, but the following still might be of value to someone:
I still use CoolEdit Pro V2.1 for low level editing. ie. It allows you to edit right down to a single sample. You can zoom in and grab the sample with your mouse and then raise or lower the sample value graphically or just highlight it and enter a new sample value with your keyboard. These low level editing functions were removed from later Audition versions for some reason.
I use CEP2.1 from inside Reaper DAW. Reaper allows you to call an external audio editor from one of its drop down menus. You have to set this up previously of course and tell Reaper which audio editor you will be using. This works under both Win XP 32bit and Win7 32bit. Haven’t tried 64bit OS yet.
If you know where to look you can still find CEP V2.1 out there at no cost. I won’t elaborate further.
I’m still on CoolEdit Pro 2. Last version before Adobe purchased and added all the clunkiness.
i must add that i deal with “clicks” and “pops” from drum breaks in the following procedure:
I load wav that i want to get rid of pops/clicks, and i use “draw” tool to just “straighten out” pops and clicks without harming the overall sound, harmony, frequency, etc. I find this the ultimate de-clicker solution in renoise as you can literally “draw” however you want without introducing artifacts!!
Thanks very much guys for all replies. Right now it’s mainly Renoise’s built in editor and occasionally wavosaur which I use for audio editing. I wish I had a copy of cool edit pro as it seems it would be best suited for my needs. Such a shame Adobe bought it and turned it into that bloatfest. I will search on ebay from time to time, maybe someone is still selling it…
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Audacity all the way. It totally offers sample-level editing, and has ever since I began using it, many years ago. Free, stable, and if you really need to, you can use VSTs and Audio Units with it. It’s biggest drawback is that it’s kinda ugly. Some VST/AU plugins make it crash. It’s not really made for that kind of work, it’s a sample editor, not a DAW/studio. Yet, you can totally multitrack with it. Light on resources and free.
I’ve used CEP back in the late 90s, early 2000’s. By now, Audacity has surpassed it and is compatible on every OS. Have used many other audio editors in the past and currently, why turn down free software? I sure do wish it was prettier, but it’s not that important to me 
I’ve been using Wavosaur for years but over the weekend I downloaded and played around a bit with ocenaudio. I like ocenaudio very much so far and it could perhaps become my goto WAV editor to trim up, eq, & normalize etc my final mixdowns