BIAS Peak or DSP Quattro?

[mduser63]

I'm looking to buy an audio editor. I've used Sound Forge (version 6) and Cool Edit/Adobe Audition on the PC and I like both of them. I've tried some of the free and shareware stuff on the Mac, like Audacity, Peak Express, Sound Studio and Amadeus, and I've been less than impressed with them. So, I'm ready to buy a good stereo audio editor. I'm not particularly worried about price, I'm mostly worried about quality. I want something that's full featured and has an intuitive interface that's not clunky. I never thought I'd say this, but the PC audio editing software I've used had MUCH better interfaces than the 4 Mac programs I mentioned above.

So, what do people recommend for audio editing software? I know the two big ones are DSP Quattro and BIAS Peak. Which one is better and why? Is there another program you like even better than those two? What would compare best with Sound Forge and Audition? I'm not doing music creation, I'm doing audio editing for video production, so multitrack recording isn't necessary, stereo is fine. Thanks!

 

[-Jeff]

I prefer DSP Quattro

Yeah, Mac audio editors don't impress me much either. I switched from a Pentium 4 to a iMac G5 recently, and the only thing I really miss is Adobe Audition. For two-track editing, DSP Quattro was the closest thing to Audition that I could find. I tried Peak for a few hours, but it really screwed up my workflow.

There are demo versions of both programs available for download. Peak is fully functional, but the demo expires after 14 days. The DSP Quattro demo does not expire, but it doesn't allow you to save anything.

-Jeff

 

[pulsewidth947]

Just adding my rant.

I use Peak at work and its fairly nasty. I'm having to keep a PC around just so I can still use Adobe Audition. Adobe really need to pull their finger out and release Audition for Mac. They would make a killing as it is, in my opinion of course, one of the best editors available.

Theres lots of little features missing in Peak that I use all the time with Audition.. I'm optimistic that there will be a Mac version next tiem theres a big update to Audition.. maybe thats just wishful thinking.

 

[mduser63]

I also would like to see a Mac version of Adobe Audition. I had assumed that they hadn't already released one because they figured that competition on the Mac was already good, and people weren't likely to buy a new product. Now that I see that the stuff out there for Mac is less than appealing, I'm hopeful that they will release Audition for the Mac in the future.

 

[mduser63]

I've got a question for people who have used Peak. I've downloaded the trial, and it's not as bad as Peak Express. However, I've gotten stuck trying to do something that I could easily do in Sound Forge. I have two mono audio files. I simply want to copy each file into the channels of a new stereo file, one file in the left channel, the other in the right channel. Copy/Paste doesn't work, because it does a ripple paste so that the audio in the right channel is before the audio in the left channel (or vice versa) if that makes any sense.

I've attached a screenshot which shows the problem. The waveforms should be side by side in the two channels, not one before the other. Anyone know how to do what I'm asking?

 

[-Jeff]

It couldn't hurt...

There is an online petition to bring Audition to the Mac. Anyone interested in signing it should follow this link:

http://www.petitiononline.com/djtobes/petition.html

Hopefully Adobe will see that there is a growing number of Mac users that would not hesitate to buy it. I doubt that even Apple could design a more intuitive audio editor.

 

[mduser63]

I just signed the petition. Thanks for that link. I ended up doing what I was trying to do above using Final Cut Pro. Having used Peak for a few hours, I can honestly say that it's not worth anywhere even close to the asking price. I will probably buy Amadeus II which is a relatively cheap shareware program that does some things much better than Peak, especially analysis of audio files, which is perhaps most important to me in an audio editor.

 

[JFreak]

peak is the way to go, that compares to soundforge and wavelab. with the full version, you can use up to five vst/au plugins at once and create crossfade-cd:s, but that's about all there is to separate full and light versions.

you can make stereo-interleaved audio file from two mono files by simply importing dual mono files, which command should be found from the file menu if i remember correctly.

 

[JFreak]

...does some things much better than Peak, especially analysis of audio files, which is perhaps most important to me in an audio editor.

peak is an audio editor and not audio analyzer, that's why peak sucks at analyzing audio. peak however lets you use the specialized plugin of your choice. that's the way to go. plugins are everything when you work "in the box", which is what you do with audio editors. when you need to use hardware inserts, you use protools, simple as that.

 

[mduser63]

peak is an audio editor and not audio analyzer, that's why peak sucks at analyzing audio. peak however lets you use the specialized plugin of your choice. that's the way to go. plugins are everything when you work "in the box", which is what you do with audio editors. when you need to use hardware inserts, you use protools, simple as that.

Thanks for the tip on importing dual mono files. That's a big help. Do you know of a good spectrogram plugin that will work for Peak? Sound Forge and Audition have good spectrograms built in, and Amadeus has a pretty good one, so I'm sort of surprised that Peak has no capability in that regard without a plug in.

 

[Majglow]

I use peak myself. It does everything that I need to to do great. I'm not sure what audition does which is so great (but then I've never used it).

I use it in conjunction to Logic Pro, and a slew of other applications though.

 

[Duff-Man]

Duff-Man says...as an owner of Peak and DSP Quattro...I like DSP-Q better at the moment. It is more intuitive, and cheaper too. However, Peak v5 is coming soon so that may change the equation again.....oh yeah!

 

[allan_zip]

For audio analysis Elemental Audio Systems have a free plug-in called Inspector for download on their site, i guess you get what you pay for in respect of it's capabilities and i cant compare it to anything in audition or soundforge, never used them. AudioXplorer and Frequency may also be worth a look but they are freestanding apps so are probably not what you're after.