Topic: favorite audio editing software?

[spyder9]

Adobe Audition

[setboy]

Second Mac user chiming in: I use and recommend Audiofile Engineering's Wave Editor. 

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/waveeditor/techspecs.php

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/waveeditor/

I use this too. It gets the job done. Wish it had a different way to track things out.  I still miss sound forge though.
still pretty good.

[OOK]

I love soundforge.....

[Matt Quinn]

Ableton Live

[pdastoor]

I use a mixture of Audacity & Nero Wav Editor almost 95% of the time. I also use Nero Soundtrax, Soundbooth, Audition & Pro tools. Always done everything in Audacity, but now combine it with Nero Wav Editor since it has some cool features.

[H₂O]

wavelab

[illconditioned]

Audacity

As far as applications that can run in linux natively.  And has semi-intuitive editing capabilities (and a GUI).  And if all you need is to trim and apply a little gain, more than sufficient.  It has a nyquist interfacing option too.  Or if you're senile you can run nyquist directly from the cli with a script or interactively.

Audacity has the advantage that it is free, and that it works on multiple platforms.  The thing I don't like is the lack of real-time effects.  I want to be able to change the settings while playing through an effect.  AFAIK Audacity only allows you to apply an effect to a region, or preview (first few seconds only).  I could live with the clunkiness if it would do realtime effects.

My general choices are Wavelab (for Montage editing, effects, cd creation), Audition (for spectrum display and spectral-domain editing), and Reaper (simplest software for mulitrack recording with ASIO devices, under Windows).

  Richard

[morst]

Favorite? MOTU Digital Performer on the mac.

Easiest for a beginner to use to get some work done? The latest beta version of audacity on any machine.

Most reliable for DAT transfers? for me personally, my old ProTools project 4.1.1 system running under mac OS9 is Rock Solid for two-channel work.

[moonchilddave]

Another Mac (MacBook / 10.6.6) user here with a vote for Sound Studio... I also have never had issues with it crashing.  I'm running the latest now, 4.1 and do like how responsive it is in 64 bit mode.  I did have to track down a 64 bit version of the LAME framework to be able to work with MP3's though as the one I had installed prior was only 32 bit.

[Gutbucket]

Samplitude, despite the learning curve.
Raptor Reaper looks interesting, especially for it's routing abilities, and is inexpensive but I haven't tried it.

Audacity is simpler and free but limited.
Used CEP a bit before it was bought by Adobe and turned into Audition and liked it, never did much advanced work with it and don't know how much carried over to Audition.
Tried Goldwave briefly and didn't care for it but I didn't put much time into it.

[faninor]

I used to use Audition when it was Cool Edit Pro... and I still use it as Audition. I think it's one of the rare cases where the big name acquisition didn't negatively impact the software. Some of the enhancements they've done since have become invaluable to me.

I basically use the software as a one-stop shop (except for tracking) with the multi-track mode (whether or not I'm really working with multiiple tracks). I archive the original raw recording (compressed to FLAC) and the (very small) Audition multitrack project file. Doesn't take up a lot of space but very easy to go back and make any tweaks later if I decide something needs it.

[ashevillain]

Another Mac (MacBook / 10.6.6) user here with a vote for Sound Studio... I also have never had issues with it crashing.  I'm running the latest now, 4.1 and do like how responsive it is in 64 bit mode.  I did have to track down a 64 bit version of the LAME framework to be able to work with MP3's though as the one I had installed prior was only 32 bit.

I tried the trial of Sound Studio 4 and didn't quite like it. For one it locked up on me (which is the first time I've ever had something lock up on this MBPro). The other things I didn't like is that the new FLAC support has no way of specifying what level of compression to use and the transport should have the ability to be at the bottom or the top (or floating if that's your preference)....there was really no reason to move it to the bottom. I might try it again at some point but for now I'm find on 3.6.

Also a question: Has anyone tried Wavelab 7 for Mac? I tried it out and could not for the life of me figure out why it has a 2GB limit imposed when every other piece of software uses the standard 4GB limit.

[acidjack]

I've got the current Audition Beta for Mac.  The effects are obviously more powerful, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how you make it do tracking.  Any advice?

Also, I have to admit, the spectral display looks cool, but I have absolutely zero understanding of what that actually does.

I watched some of the Audition intro videos on their site, which are helpful, but is there somewhere to get a sort of broad overview of software-based editing of audio files?  I use Audacity almost all the time, because it's easy, and I don't heavily manipulate my files.

For that matter, I was under the impression that most people here don't heavily manipulate their files.... so what exactly are these extremely advanced features that the other editors have that Audacity doesn't, besides real-time monitoring?  Audition, for example, has better zoom and compression tools, but the latter is something that I very rarely use, usually just on weird sounding or badly balanced board feeds...

[faninor]

Typically when processing recordings I make, I usually just use some combination of parallel compression and EQ to get the sound that I like in an Audition multitrack project.

As an example, if I have a recording where I feel the bass has too much dynamic range (perhaps the kick drum is standing out too much) I put the recording in two tracks on the project, on the main track I will roll off the bass somewhat and on the second track I will apply a low-pass filter effect and compression with a big ratio to knock down the peaks from the kick drum. It takes some trial and error to find the best attack and release times. Then some more playing around to fine-tune the roll off on the main track and bring the bass volume back up from the other track.

[Gutbucket]

You're doing 2-band (multiband) compression, applying compression only to the lowest band and doing the x-over between bands manually by adjusting the pass-filters and levels and summing the tracks.  I often find doing stuff like this manually on several tracks is more intuitive and understandable, but you might try a multiband compressor plugin to do basically the same thing as a single stereo track effect (or as a single effect at the master bus level).  If that works for you that may simplify your workflow.