“Peak” is a long-standing name in audio editing on the Mac. I recently got to review its latest iteration, Peak Pro 6, for Macworld and Macworld.com.

Macworld Review: Peak Pro 6
Sample editor and audio suite tweaked for pros, sound designers, and podcasters

I still believe audio editors are valuable tools, especially for anyone who spends a significant amount of their time on sound design – whether that’s sound effects or building the perfect drum kit. Peak is an unusual tool, in a way, in that it remains a stereo waveform editor only, whereas most of its competitors have added multitrack compatibility. On the other hand, Peak also bundles an unusually rich set of tools in the box, which explains the higher price of the full-blown Pro versions.

Here’s my breakdown for Macworld:

Pros
Attractive bundle; seamless podcast export; powerful playlist assembly and export; envelopes; deep plug-in routing; fantastic cross-synthesis sonic powers.

Cons
Multi-window UI can be clunky to use; still no real multi-channel or surround support; lacks more full-featured, non-destructive editing; no spectrum view.

I do want to call particular attention to a couple of points:

You can get Peak cheaply if you want a deal. Unbundled, more basic versions run under a hundred bucks, and as noted in comments, you may even snag a deal on an upgrade.

Peak Pro is fundamentally a bundle. The full-blown version may indeed cause some sticker shock, but it’s really about the bundled software – if you want that software, it could be well worth it.

Vbox and cross-synthesis really rock. This is the feature that makes me really, really glad I got to stick Peak Pro on my MacBook. As pictured at top, the combination allows you to route plug-ins in interesting ways and then create routings that are impossible in most other hosts. (Add batch processing, and this gets very interesting, indeed. I’m going to try it on a stack of audio files – I’ll post samples soon.)

All products involve tradeoffs, so as always I try to do my best to characterize the tradeoffs I see. (“This is the perfect tool for everything” is the job of the marketing department.) I’m still particularly fond of the Windows-only Sound Forge (now made by Sony), but Peak remains a strong entry on the Mac. It’s also worth checking out Peak’s nearest rival, Audiofile Engineering’s Wave Editor, which has been developing by leaps and bounds. The Peak / Wave Editor competition could be an interesting one; they take very different approaches to the problem.

As always, I’m happy to hear what readers and users think.

Bias Inc.

Keep those compatibility reports coming. We’ve heard some general frustrations with Leopard (as can happen with any OS update), and ongoing specific issues with M-Audio products. Digidesign Pro Tools 7.4 remains unsupported on the new OS. (Note that “unsupported” doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work, as one reader observes.) I’m running Leopard here successfully on a MacBook Pro. It’s working nicely, and there are some nifty usability improvements, but on the other hand I’m not sure I’d go out of my way to make the leap when Tiger works so well.

Wavosaur is a free audio editor for Windows that just hit version 1.0. It’s really good stuff: not only is it free, but the whole app is tiny (488kb), it’s designed to fit on a portable USB key, it hosts VSTs, and it’s an elegant waveform editor reminiscent of early versions of SoundForge. Even if you’ve got a wave editor of choice, might be worth sticking this on your USB key when you’re on the go — especially since it supports Windows 98, XP, and Vista. And it doesn’t have an installer or touch the Registry.

I just gave it a spin on my Vista install, and really enjoy it — clean interface, lots of features.

Basic features:

• Multiple file editing
• All the editing and processing you need (convert channels, normalize, cut and paste, trim, fade in / out, the usual)
• Pitch shift, vocal removal (karaoke, whoo!), loop points and markers
• ASIO, VST support
• Support for MP3, Akai, Amiga, and many other file formats
• Analysis features (2D, 3D)

Hmmm, look out — some more popular wave editors might get a run for their money. Thanks to Art from Russia for the tip!

Wavosaur Site

If you’ve been on the search for a simple, straightforward audio editor for Mac and Windows, Adobe has officially thrown its hat into the ring with Soundbooth CS3.

Soundbooth Now Shipping [Hart's Audition, from the Adobe audio product chief]
New Soundbooth User-to-User Forum

Of course, to the rest of the world, the big news is that Adobe’s full Production Premium and Master Collection suites are shipping. But Soundbooth is one program that could make sense to buy alone, as a basic audio editor. It sets itself apart both by being cross-platform and by being geared for beginners and people wanting a simple, streamlined tool. And the killer feature: there’s a lasso tool you can use directly on the audio spectrum. I’ve been using that to isolate sounds in field recordings that would otherwise be impossible to grab.

I hope to have an in-depth look at the finished tool soon, so no conclusions about the shipping software yet, but in the meantime, see our preview from the beta.

Delay Designer: This effect now allows custom delay taps, with optional sync to project tempo.

Combine clips into multichannel clip: This is nice: drag up to 24 source clips to the timeline, and you automatically get a combined multichannel clip, which should be handy for surround and stereo multichannel alike.

Various fixes for performance / stability / etc.

But there’s one release note that caught my eye: Soundtrack Pro 2 does not support iTunes Plus files. Now, that’s curious, given iTunes Plus files are supposedly “DRM-free” and stored in a format Soundtrack Pro 2 does support (AAC). In fact, I’d kind of call this, well, DRM. I can even think of cases where you might want to trim a track you bought from iTunes, like removing an intro. Not a big deal by any means, mind you, but — odd.

Hmmm…

Soundtrack Pro 2 supports AAC files.

QuickTime can open iTMS Plus files. (If you do want to edit the file, by the way, you can slice out an intro of that iTMS Plus file right in QuickTime Player, making this all the odder.)

Soundtrack Pro 2 can’t. The only reason seems to be that Apple disabled the ability to do that. That sure sounds like Digital Rights Management to me (albeit in a very specific and bizarre case).

If anyone knows a reason why I might be wrong here, please do speak up. (Just tried it for myself with an ITMS Plus track, and Soundtrack Pro in fact reported that it couldn’t open the file.)

Updated: Or it could just be a bug. “DRM” as a theory still doesn’t make sense. The author of Sound Studio notes an AAC bug that’s a likely culprit. It’d be ironic that Apple’s own developers couldn’t work around an Apple API problem — but I can’t actually pretend to be surprised, either, especially as this particular functionality wouldn’t be a very high priority for support in Soundtrack Pro. Thanks, Lucius. (See comments.) And, yeah, that makes a heck of a lot more sense than selective DRM that takes effect only in a single pro app and nowhere else on the system. We’ll call it DPB: Digital Playback Bug.

I should also note that Felt Tip Software’s Sound Studio is an excellent, eminently affordable wave editor for Mac. I used it in the early days of OS X when nothing else ran. Since then, it’s become a very mature piece of software — well worth the cash over, say, suffering through Audacity for free. (Sorry, Audacity.) So if you feel left out by the fact that Soundtrack Pro is only available within Final Cut Studio, you should add Sound Studio to your list of tools to consider as an alternative, as well.

Soundtrack Pro 2 from Apple offers some major new improvements over the first release of the “Pro” audio editor from Apple. Multichannel editing now works properly, with the ability to nudge by frames and move clip envelopes together with clips, and there are some brilliant new features for conforming audio projects to video and a “Lift and Stamp” tool for applying audio attributes from one clip (including matching EQ and copying effects) to another.

Macworld.com has just published my complete review of the software:

Pros: Vastly improved multichannel editing and file import and export; Conform feature makes Final Cut integration more elegant; efficient surround panning; improved recording; convenient Lift and Stamp audio.

Cons: Automation requires AppleScript; rigid and sometimes sluggish interface; available only as part of the Final Cut Studio suite.

Soundtrack Pro 2: Improved editing and new features help you sync audio with video

Soundtrack vs. Final Cut Studio vs. Logic

The bad news, of course, is that the only way to get Soundtrack Pro 2 is to either buy Final Cut Studio or upgrade to the whole Final Cut Studio. Worse, as we’ve commented here before, existing Soundtrack Pro users had to upgrade to Final Cut Studio just to get Intel compatibility. Not surprisingly, this issues comes up in comments even at Macworld.com (and I’ve certainly heard it repeatedly from readers here).

Apple’s made their decision, though, and on some level I definitely understand it. The reality is that this market isn’t terribly big. Apple indicated when they made the decision to discontinue Soundtrack Pro as a standalone product that response had been lackluster. And I’ve heard from waveform software developers that it really isn’t a big market. Lots of people do need to edit audio at some point, but they’re often intimidated by the tools out there, or just don’t make the leap of investing in a dedicated tool. I do think it’s too bad Intel users didn’t have a better upgrade path, of course.

Mac users are hardly high-and-dry when it comes to audio editing. There are other standalone wave editors from which to choose, like the old standby Peak and newer entries like the Audiofile Wave Editor and Adobe’s Soundbooth CS3, which has just started to ship.

Before anyone worries any more about this issues, though, I think the real question is when some of these features will show up in Logic. I have no idea what Apple will do with their next version of Logic, but it’s a pretty safe guess to figure some of Soundtrack Pro’s features will show up in Logic. (I don’t think there will be a bundled copy of Soundtrack in Logic, but if they copy some of the functionality, you might not want it.)

For those of you who do use Final Cut Studio, of course, and cross between the visual and sound worlds (as we do), Soundtrack Pro is well worth a look. The integration and value is greatly expanded in this version for people who do want Soundtrack as a part of Final Cut Studio. Be sure to check out the Final Cut Pro and Color reviews by my Macworld colleagues, or my Motion review. Complaints welcome here.

What About Audio Post?

I’m curious to hear what some of our post production readers think of the new audio post features. To me, it’s a little soon to tell how things like the new conform feature will work in actual production environments, especially since we’ve debated here on CDM over features the size of King Kong (in movieland) or Doctor Who (in TVland). Those of you working in post, do share … though, naturally, the integration here assumes you’re starting out with workflows in Final Cut Pro to begin with, and are willing to do audio conform outside Pro Tools.

I have a confession to make: I haven’t had a good-quality 2-track audio editor installed on my Mac in several years. You might wonder how I’ve been doing all of my waveform editing during that time…and I might be wondering the same thing.

Back when I was still using OS 9, I ran Peak as my primary editor – it was fast, relatively simple, and, well, one of the only games in town (SoundEdit 16 and Sound Designer II were both discontinued at the time). Under OS X, I never upgraded Peak. It had become too bloated, too complex, and I honestly couldn’t justify spending money on the upgrade with the level of editing I was doing. But as my needs grew, I continued to search for something that ‘flowed’ with my workflow. So I tried demos of other apps – Audacity never worked right with my audio interface, Soundbooth was too rudimentary, Soundtrack was nice until Apple killed the app-only option and bundled it into Final Cut studio, and DSP Quattro, while very capable, just never really resonated with my way of working. I had nearly given up – and was settled on continuing to use Logic Pro and Wave Burner for all of my edits. Deep down I still hoped there was something out there that might, someday, do exactly what I needed, without putting a lot of other stuff in my way. Enter Audiofile Engineering’s Wave Editor.

At work I’ve been using SoundForge daily for the past year as my primary editor. It isn’t pretty, but it does what I need it to do in a relatively fast way and produces consistent, quality results. My hope has always been to find a Mac app that gave me the speed and quality of SoundForge, but with a more refined interface. Today, I’m happy to write, that my hope has been met.

First, let me tell you a bit about the company. From what little I know of the duo that make up AE, I can tell you that they are passionate about audio and the Mac platform, and dedicated to the pursuit of making highly functional, highly elegant Mac software solutions. If I had to compare them to any other Mac company I’ve worked with, my first thought would be the highly esteemed Omnigroup. Quite an accomplishment for a two-man organization.

I’ve been testing Wave Editor for a few months now (both the release version 1.2.x and the beta version 1.3.x), and I can honestly say I’ve finally found the app I’ve been looking for. It takes design cues from a variety of excellent applications (including SDII and even Photoshop), and offers extremely high quality algorithms and processes – all while keeping all the tools out of the way when you don’t need them. Nearly every function of the application can be assigned to a custom keyboard command, which is ideal for people who appreciate elegance, speed, and giving a break to their mouse hand.

To really appreciate the benefits of this app, one must spend some time with it. After skimming the documentation and trying to fumble my way through the app for a few days, I came across some nice video tutorials over at Razormaid, and sat down with my copy as they walked through the basic functions. As I did this, the real power and elegance of the app became immediately apparent.

Without going into gratuitous detail, I’m going to touch on the elements of Wave Editor that really sets it apart from the other apps I’ve used.

Edit Blocks/SmartEdits

Wave Editor utilizes a ‘regioning’ type system called SmartEdits. This system allows you to slice your audio file up into sections in order to customize how those sections will interact with one another. Think of it as a playlist editor on steroids (but better). As shown in the image below, I have taken a wave file, split it into four edit blocks (two blocks times two channels), and setup crossfades for each. Note that you can apply separate crossfade types for fade-ins, fade-outs, and on a per-channel basis. These are all applied non-destructively and can be changed on-the-fly, either in the edit window, or by changing values in the SmartEdit list.

Layers

Anyone who has used an image manipulation program such as Adobe Photoshop will likely be familiar with the concept of layers. Wave Editor has implemented a similar system, allowing you to composite multiple sources and apply effects in a completely non-destructive way, with the freedom to add or remove any individual layer (or process) in order to audition the effects on-the-fly. In the shot below, we have two sound layers: a large glass break and a smaller glass shuffle. The larger sound sits in the primary layer (faded blue), and the smaller sound sits in the second layer, with an audio-unit reverb on it. We can audition each layer individually, adjust the volume of each, add effects, and tweak to our heart’s content. We can then save the file as a Wave Editor native file (.wedt), which will keep all of those settings intact. When we’re ready to print (apply) the combined total, we simply ‘flatten’ all the layers and we have our final product. Wave Editor suffers from a similar issue I have in SoundForge, however: when using third party plugins, it doesn’t recognize that you may want to add the tail of the reverb or delay. When using Apple’s built-in AU for reverb, the reverb tail can be added automatically by Wave Editor, but when using a third party verb, you had better add the silence manually first to the end of the file – else you’ll end up cropping the tail of the verb at the original file endpoint. A minor annoyance -and one I’m used to working with.

Interface

I can’t say enough good things about the interface – it is easy to get things out of the way if you don’t want them. If you’re just editing a large playlist, you can maximize the SmartEdit window and view only a small window for the waveform. If you’re doing fine sample-accurate editing, you can have a giant waveform view. Best of all, you can create custom templates for all the various tasks you do – say one for region editing, one for mastering, one for general edits, etc. Each of these can be saved and applied to any new or existing document at anytime, allowing you to quickly access all the components you need, exactly when you need them.

As someone who’s chronically fighting wrist and finger fatigue from mousing, trackballing and typing, I like to keep as much of my work in front of me as possible. By that I mean: give me keyboard shortcuts over a mouse click any day of the week. Wave Editor has this in spades – as mentioned, almost every possible function of the app can be controlled by a keyboard shortcut. A helpful list shows you which commands are assigned to which functions, allows you to clear and reset the commands easily, and prompts you if the command is used by another function. All apps should be this easy to use when customizing your keyboard commands. Elegant.

Pitch and Time Shift – iZotope SonicFit

As a sound designer, I use pitch shift and time stretching all the time. It is probably my most commonly used process, aside from dynamic adjustment. As any regular user will tell you, SoundForge has functional pitch shift and time stretch algorithms, but they leave something to be desired in the quality department. Whenever possible I’ll use the functions in Cubase…

Wave Editor hasn’t skimped here, though. They use the highly regarded iZotope SonicFit technology for pitch and time adjustment, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the results.

It should also be noted that AE uses the iZotope 64-bit process for samplerate conversion. These, too, sound fantastic and are a welcome addition for those whose needs span a wide range of samplerates.

Etc.

A few other notable features:

• multiple crossfade types
• support for multi-channel audio formats
• wide variety of ’snap-to’ features (regions, markers, loop-points, etc.)
• repair for damaged WAV files
• unlimited Undo
• competitive pricing – Wave Editor is $250, SoundForge 9 is $299
• responsive customer support

I’ve always loved supporting software and hardware companies who are passionate about what they do, responsive to their customers, and still able to deliver an amazing product at an excellent price. Audiofile Engineering and Wave Editor hit all these marks and more. If you’re looking for a high-quality, elegant and dedicated audio editor for OS X, do yourself a favor – download the fully-functional demo from the Audiofile Engineering website immediately, run through the Razormaid tutorials, and decide for yourself. I’m pretty confident that you’ll agree that Wave Editor is one of the best audio editors available for OS X – or any platform – today.

Note: Audiofile Engineering also offers a robust batch conversion utility, voiceover editing suite, and a realtime audio multi-analyzer. Though I haven’t yet had a chance to run these utilities through their paces, if the quality of Wave Editor is any indication, I’m certain they are all exceptional.

Aside from commercial alternatives, the preferred open source audio editor tool is Audacity. Early releases of Audacity were unquestionably rough around the edges, in terms of both stability and features, but thanks to the efforts of the open source community, the software is steadily improving.

Version 1.2.5, released this week, is the new stable version, with Intel Mac support, bug fixes, and now FLAC audio support. (Seems the FLAC support alone is worth keeping it on your hard drive, even if you prefer other tools.)

The 1.3.2 beta is where things start to get more interesting:

1. New selection bar and improved selection tools
2. Dockable toolbars
3. New “Repair” effect, other improved effects
4. Auto-save and automatic crash recovery

Audacity Homepage
New 1.3 Features

I’ve been playing around with the beta a bit and am finding it fairly stable; there are lots of stability improvements and fixes in the 1.3.2 beta as well as the 1.2.5 stable release. Given the auto-save and crash recovery in the beta, I’d actually skip the stable build and move straight onto the beta, if you can.

Also new with this release: 90 LADSPA plug-ins (the open source plug-in format, standard on Linux audio apps) have now been ported to Windows:
Audacity Plug-in Effects Downloads

Again, it might be worth downloading Audacity just to gain access to these LADSPA plug-ins. Now, I’ll repeat a plea before to commercial developers: please, consider adding LADSPA support to your application. Cakewalk? Ableton? Adobe? Anybody? It’d be great to have this open source format become more of a standard outside Linux; everyone would benefit from wider adoption.

Audacity itself is still worth a try if you can’t shell out cash for a commercial audio editor. I still think it’s worth investing in a wave editor if you rely heavily on this tool in your work, but it’s still important to have open source alternatives.

[tags]audio-editors, open-source, linux, mac, windows, mactel, universal, software, upgrades, beta, free, plug-ins, LADSPA[/tags]

The first response came over the weekend from Adobe’s John Nack on his personal blog, waxing largely philosophical about why it made sense to support the newer Intel Macs instead of the PowerPC platform Apple themselves had abandoned. Now, I’ll be the first to concede Mac users can be hotheaded, but I think the better response would be to cut straight to the technical reasons why Adobe’s developers made this choice. Mac users assume, because they’ve been told so repeatedly by Apple, that creating universal applications is a “checkbox-clicking affair.” You can see a comment to that effect in the extensive discussion Mr. Nack triggered on his site.

Adobe audio product manager Hart Shafer chimes in today with the simpler technical answer:

Soundbooth and PowerPC Chips [Hart's Audition]

Basically, Soundbooth contains lots of Intel-specific code that would be inefficient to port to PowerPC, and the additional QA testing required for an additional CPU architecture was deemed an unworthy investment. (Note that the flipside of this argument would be that, as some Mac users had hoped, Apple’s switch to Intel makes development cheaper for software that’s heavily reliant on the processor, like audio apps.) Now, I’m in no position to evaluate that argument. Since a significant number of our readers are programmers, I’ll let you read his entry and tell us if you think this is a significant issue. What is interesting here is that Shafer never says Adobe’s can’t also port Audition to the Mac. I’m going to keep hoping this is possible; Peak can’t meet everyone’s needs, the excellent Spark is long gone, Apple discontinued their standalone editor product, and I think Mac users would welcome Audition with open arms. In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoy using Audition on my PC.

But, regardless of whether Adobe made the right call here (and it’s their choice to make), there is one conclusion that’s safe to draw here: cross-platform development isn’t always as easy as it might seem. Some newly-coded apps can be easily ported to multiple platforms, although (speaking as someone who routinely runs apps on Mac, Windows, and even Linux side by side) not always with equivalent performance results. Others would be so difficult to port that the time would be wasted. The irony is, the ongoing march of computer technology may mean the easiest way to use software on different platforms is to keep an extra computer handy. (Hint: rescue a computer from someone who’s going to throw it away, repair it, and laugh heartily.)