Update in Sound status in Blender
VSE in Blender has been typically a second class citizen. In the last years It
has received a little of love, but nothing compared to the rest of Blender.
And Sound is only used in VSE. Blender source code includes Audaspace, which is a very capable audio library.
My feelings are that Blender developers don’t have time to think about sound. It
is not enumerated in the “modules” list, but as section in VFX & video (a
section without a project), whose responsible is not even in the Blender
Foundation. At least, in the GSoC 2023, there is an idea proposed to improve
waveform drawing. When I tried to tag my branch, I couldn’t find a “sound” tag.
When Tintwotin (who I could never thank enough for his support and information)
or I tried to get some opinions or responses from the main developers, we only
got vague answers, not even a “loud and clear NO”.
But users don’t care about sound in Blender, neither. A simple search in
blenderartists gives that most of the topics about sound are game engine related
(which is no longer included in Blender). If you see presentations in Blender
Conference, there are 2 or 3 a little related to VSE, and no mentions of Sound,
so how can we blame them! My impression is that sound is only used for synchronizing images with sound.
Anyway, there are people who use VSE as a video editor. ISS, the current
developer of VSE, has devoted a lot of effort in dealing with external files,
re-timing, variable frame rate,… which means that Blender developers consider VSE as some kind of video editor, with future.
Tintwotin created a tool to synchronize Blender playback with Audacity, but it does not
longer works.
I tried to create a modifier for sound strips. As they stated in the developers
wiki, I avoided the inclusion of external binaries, which would be an excellent
point to support VST plugins. I had to create a
framework for the modifiers, as there was no support for them, currently. I
thought that some simple modifiers could give Blender more use cases, affecting
the least to the rest of the application. And it could be the seed to add more
useful features, like Mixer, VUMeter, Sound bands, … who knows!
I got contacted by other people who were interested in them, even in creating
some of them. But they have just quitted. Official
Blender developers didn’t look like they knew what to do about that. Some UI
concerns, some running issues, some compiling flags,… Some of them, at least,
took the time to try it. Even, the core code got included in the Audaspace
source code, so who ever wants, would be able to create a simple sound
equalizer. But I think that I can no longer pull the car, or there is no car to
pull 
But this is not about blaming people. It is about getting something useful. So,
we, as users, as creative people, what can we do? I know that some people out there uses VSE as
a video editor. How do you edit the sound? What applications are better
companions for Blender? Audacity or Ardour are well suited for the purpose?
And how do you synchronize the timeline? can we do something with
OpenTimelimeIO? Any example working today with Blender 3.5?