Product Reviews

Peak owes its position as the world's best Mac audio editor to its speed, ease of use and versatility. Widely used in the film, broadcast and music industries, Peak can optimise audio for Internet streaming and multimedia, master and burn audio CDs, clean up old vinyl disks, synch to picture for video and film sound design and much more.

Peak's capabilities are further enhanced in version 3.1 by support for Mac OS X 10.1, QuickTime 6 and Dolby AAC audio file encoding. Dolby AAC is a new standard for high-quality reduced bandwidth audio delivery that employs a compression algorithm superior to MP3. Dolby claims that the quality of Dolby AAC-encoded sound files is indistinguishable from uncompressed CD audio.

Windows WAV format file handling is more comprehensively implemented than in previous versions, with 24-bit file support and markers, loops, regions and file information are now usefully saved along with the audio data. Additionally, Broadcast WAVE files with Broadcast Audio Extension chunks are recognised.

The Peak 3.1 editing environment is a pleasure to work in. Comprehensive user-definable keyboard and icon shortcuts are available: the icon styling has changed from the rather cryptic, coloured icons found in previous versions of Peak and they're easier to read. Another great new feature is user-definable contextual menu support, which provides quick way to access menu commands.

Several audio files can be open at the same time, each with a multiple undo edit history and waveform displays. Audio regions can be freely and nondestructively cut and pasted between open documents. Each document displays an overview of the file being edited together with a detailed view of the area being worked on. Audio file characteristics, such as its length, resolution and amplitude peak, are clearly displayed.

Peak practice

As an aid to navigation, Peak 3.1 provides three

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types of marker, which are colour coded and superimposed on the waveform graphic. Region markers designate areas of the audio file that are for export or represent individual CD tracks. Reference markers are a navigational aid used to identify a segment of the audio file for editing operations. Loop markers define the start and end points of looped audio segments. These can be used with Peak's Guess Tempo and Loop Surfer tools before exporting the audio to MIDI Samplers or when building a composite audio file consisting of repeated loops. The new Duplicate command helps with this latter task.

Peak 3.1 ships with 29 internal DSP processors and 25 VST compatible plug-in effects. The DSP processors are offline functions. Changes are destructive and are applied directly and permanently to the source audio file on your hard drive. The DSP processing is of a uniformly high standard and includes essentials such as Change Gain, DC Offset Correction, Normalise, Pitch Shift, Time Stretch, Mix, Dither, Sample Rate Conversion, Click Removal, Fade and Crossfade, together with exotica such as Convolution Reverb Creation (acoustic space sampling), Phase Vocoder and Reverse Boomerang.

The VST plug-in effects are non-destructive (all effects are applied in real time to a temporary copy of the audio material). When you're happy with your changes, the processed audio can be saved to disk as a new file. All VST processing is applied through the integrated V-Box plug-in wrapper which can be used independently of Peak 3.1 in any VST plug-in-compatible application.

Overall, we had reservations about the quality of MDA VST plug-ins bundled with the package, which, although useful for sound creation or noncritical uses, were below the standard expected for professional mastering. The exception was the new a four band Parametric EQ, which sounded quite sweet. It's worth noting that BIAS Freq and the Carbonized Freeverb-c are the only VST plug-ins bundled with Peak 3.1 that are currently OS X compatible.

Sound Manager is supported, but if higher audio resolutions are required then any ASIO compatible audio hardware device can be used, but only in Mac OS 8.6 and Mac OS 9. Sadly, ASIO technology is incompatible with CoreAudio and specific CoreAudio compliant drivers are needed to run third-party audio hardware in OS X 10.1.

The lack of a printed manual is a disappointing omission. However, we were generally impressed with Peak 3.1 and its speed and ease of use are excellent.