Hi,

I believe in the context of research and study as you mentioned MATLAB or OCTAVE are really nice software because they provide you with high level functions that can ease your work.

You can do perform all the useful analysis easily :

Frequency Analysis (Fourier Transform - fft)

Time - Frequency analysis (Wavelet Transform, Short Time Fourier,...)

and much more

You can easily add third parties toolboxes to these two sofwares.

Thanks

I have used python with the package Neo for importing electrophysiological data  http://neuralensemble.org/neo/

I was very impressed. I could easily import the data and start playing with it immediately. It also supports  many different formats.

In addition it allows you to analyze the data with the power of python! It has packages for signal processing, for neural modeling (Brain, Pynn) and so much more. For example I used a network theory python package networkx to analyze my data.

The benefit over Matlab as Yves suggests:

Python is free

Much more software packages available

you can use cython to turn it into C code, if you need to make it fast.

Cheers,

Jack

The best is Python as suggested by above.

I've used Matlab for several years and am just getting into Python, and I'd have to agree that Python just may be the better of the programming environments.  It's open-source, has many packages that extend its utility (which for Matlab cost extra and they are not cheap), and can run in Eclipse, a free IDE (Integrated Development Environment).  Compiling your code into an executable application also won't cost extra as it will with Matlab.  If budgeting is tight, Python is an easy answer. 

Thank you everybody for you reply.