Re: audio editor

[Pawel Kusmierek <p.kusmierek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

beaucham said:
> This is also a good time to ask for other recommendations for
> sound editors.

It is not clear to me if you want to limit your choice to an OS or to a
freeware solution.

My editor of choice is Adobe Audition. This program has been developed by
Syntrillium Software under the name CoolEdit. There used to be two
versions of CoolEdit a cheaper one (CoolEdit 96/2000), which was an
advanced audio editor, and more expensive CoolEdit Pro, which combined the
capabilities of CE96/2000 with multitrack mixing and non-destructive
editing. Unfortunately, after the takeover by Adobe, only the 'Pro'
version has been continued as Audition. If multitrack mixing and
non-destructive edits are not necessary for you, then you may feel the
program overpriced. Still, I recommend to give it a try: I find it
comfortable, reliable, and rich in features and capabilities. I think that
there is a Trial version on the Adobe site. It might be possible also to
get a second-hand CoolEdit 2000 - could be a good solution for someone who
needs just a mono/stereo editor. On the other hand, the Adobe's upgrade
policy requires upgraders to keep previous version. That's why I can't
give you my CE2000 :).

There is one caveat about the CoolEdit/Audition programs: they work only
in Windows environment (and Audition since v. 1.5 requires Win XP or 2K).

A free and multi-OS multitrack editor is Audacity
(http://audacity.sourceforge.net). However, I find it considerably less
comfortable than Audition. Some advanced sound effects (e.g., reverb,
noise reduction) yield worse results and are less controllable than in
Audition. The only advantage of Audacity over Audition which I'm aware of
is the capability to display autocorrelation( in a point, averaged over a
selection, and in the whole file as a color map), not only spectrum and
spectrogram.
Another disadvantage of Audacity is that its interface is build for
multitrack work, which is IMO not convenient when you edit a single (mono
or stereo) file.  Audition, on the other hand, offers separate interfaces
(views) for destructive editing of a single file and for non-destructive
multitrack editing. And you can easily switch between the two if you need.

Hope it helps,

Pawel



--
Pawel Kusmierek PhD
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology
ul. Pasteura 3
02-093 Warsaw, Poland
phone: (+48 22) 58 92 388
fax: (+48 22) 822 53 42
email: p.kusmierek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx