Product Reviews

Sound Studio is Felt Tip Software's popular audio shareware application, and is deservedly held in high esteem by many Mac music makers.

It's a neat digital audio editing and recording application, operating at CD-quality, 44.1KHz, 16-bit stereo, allowing you to digitise analogue signals, such as your record collection. This means you can record audio and edit any digital audio cleanly and simply in an impressive number of ways.

Version 2.0 is the first Sound Studio to be built for Mac OS X. It looks fabulous with a clean, stylish interface, and the waveform and background colours can be user-defined. Playback and recording is operated by tape recorder-style controls in the top left corner.

You can either select recording to start manually or when the signal reaches a user-defined decibel threshold. Similarly, recording can be stopped manually, when the level drops below a specified threshold, after a defined length of time or when the file reaches a certain size. The limit in one take is 2Gb (nearly three-and-a-half hours' of CD-quality recording), which should be plenty.

Getting your audio into Sound Studio depends on the source. You can record live signals, which in its simplest form could be recording your own voice through your Mac's microphone. At the other extreme, it could mean hooking up your Mac to a mixing desk and recording a band's performance to your hard disk, mixing the signal down to a stereo pair. The one drawback is that you can only record in stereo: you can't record left and right channels in separate takes, although you can audition the channels in mono and apply filters to them individually.

Source material

Similarly, if you want to make an MP3 from an existing recording, it's a simple matter of connecting the source, say, your hi-fi, balancing the meter levels and recording it straight into Sound Studio. It doesn't matter about scrappy or noisy beginnings and ends: at the most basic editing level, the cut, copy

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and paste commands enable you to move or remove segments of the audio track seamlessly, zooming in on the waveform for precise editing.

Sound Studio also lets you split a file up into smaller segments, creating a new file containing all the audio after the split marker while retaining the audio preceding the marker in the original file. This is perfect for splitting LPs into MP3 tracks, simply make one pass a side and chop it up afterwards.

You can also import pre-existing digital audio files that you want to improve. These could be anything from AIFF final mix files from your preferred multitrack sequencing program to MP3 files that you feel could benefit from some audio TLC. You might even have plans to blend two or three files together to create a continuous mix.

File types supported include AIFF, WAV, CD audio tracks, System 7 Sound, Sound Designer II, dual mono (handy for ProTools users), QuickTime and MP3. It's the same for both import and export. Sound Studio opens the waveform in a new window and editing can begin.

If your audio has noticeable pops and clicks, the Interpolate filter can take care of them. If the file is a little quiet, you can boost the overall level with the Volume or the Normalize filter. This scans the wave for volume peaks, then raises the level of those peaks to your specification, retaining the overall dynamics.

Aside from basic but essential audio-editing controls, such as a compressor, an expander, a noise gate, separate high and low-pass filters and five, 10 or 30-band graphic equalisers, there are plenty of creative filters to mess with your recording. Backwards play, chorus, delay, flanger, reverb and several noise inserts are all available, but beware the single level of undo when experimenting. Pitch shifting is also an option, although this applies to the entire audio track.

Magic moments

There is very little to complain about. Whether recording live or remixing pre-existing digital audio, Sound Studio 2.0 quickly becomes a favourite. It's great to have a tool like this, perfect for capturing a moment of inspiration and then making it shine at the mastering stage.

Basically, any audio you can get into your Mac through whatever channels you favour can be further refined and polished in Sound Studio 2.0. For anyone harbouring audio editing designs, from the music-loving amateur to the semi-professional home-studio user, Sound Studio 2.0 offers more than enough functionality to handle your editing needs. Quite simply, it's a lovely program that's a pleasure to use.