Awhile back, we reviewed Wave Editor, and deemed it one of our favorite audio editors for Mac OS X. Our friends at Audiofile Engineering have ushered in the holiday season with a complete site redesign and numerous application updates, including the highly anticipated Wave Editor 1.3, and Leopard-ready updates to apps across the board.

You may also recall that Audiofile Engineering recently rescued the excellent instrument and effect host, Rax – formerly developed by our friends at plasq. It is clear that Apple borrowed heavily from Rax’s design choices and intentions with their new MainStage application (bundled with Logic 8) but with its impressive features, custom interfaces for audio units, cool visualizer support, and active development, Rax is still the application to beat in this domain.

Competitive upgrade, crossgrade and educational pricing, sleek new icons, one of the finest audio application suites in the industry (and did we mention a simple, non-draconian form of authorization?) – Audiofile Engineering has definitely brightened the days for Mac users this season!

Sure, between applications as full-featured as Bias Peak and Apple’s own Soundtrack not to mention freeware like Audacity, Mac users are a bit spoilt for choice when it comes to audio editors. But for those like myself who long for the simplicity and elegance of the long gone SoundEdit, Rogue Amoeba may just have the answer.

Fission is the first (and currently only) OS X audio editor to support lossless editing of MP3 and AAC audio. The software has a super simple interface which provides an accurate dual-waveform view and a handful of editing commands that let you split, cut, crop, and fade audio. While still clearly a 1.0 version, it does have some slick features including audible audio scrubbing.

Fission’s streamlined interface is a joy to look at and use. Its only flaw may be that it is too stripped down for some. With a few more features, particularly support for VST and AU plug-ins, Fission could become my go-to audio editor for those times when bringing up Peak is just overkill.

Fission works with mono and stereo MP3s, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF audio files and is available now as a Universal Binary that runs natively on PowerPC and Intel Mac for US$32.