Ableton Forum

what stuff do you do in the wave editor that you cant do in live?

The best wave editors are on PC.

Wavelab is the best wave editor in terms of facilities, features, file formats, and has the audio montage and support for surround sound. Cubase's sample editor is good for a DAW but there is a reason why Steinberg made Wavelab.
Soundforge is almost as good and is super easy yet really powerful- no audio montage (so no multitrack editing) but it can do surround sound in version 9.
Adobe Audition is also very good, some prefer it (I prefer Soundforge as an editor, but Audition has the advantage of being a multitrack recorder too).


My school board's music lab which is Mac OSX based, with Logic STudio 8, Cubase 4 and a Protools HD rig keeps one stand alone PC just to run Wavelab and Soundforge.

I have used Peak on the Mac systems at work and never really liked it as much as the above 2. I don't mind Soundtrack Pro 2 bundled in Logic Studio 8, but it's not as good as the PC products.

You can do a million things in a dedicated audio editor that you can't do in Live. Fades, and complex crossfades, all the stats tools for analysis, clipped peak tools, reduction tools, noise reduction, dehumming, and having a nicer GUI with much more viewable screen area and the ability to go super magnified on a wave for editing are just a few things off the top of my head. Live's editor is OK on short clips, but is quite lacking compared to even other DAWS such as Cubase and Protools.

hm I don´t need that stuff.

Using Soundforge 9 with Parallels in OSX.
I just pause Parallels when I don't need it (to save CPU).
What's nice is that it's just drag and drop from OSX straight into the Soundforge window.
It also allows me to still use some of my old PC plugins to process.
Different strokes I guess.. I'm just more comfortable with it than Soundtrack Pro.

adobe audition 3 is the easiest for me to work with, plus the effects like reverb and audio restoration are awesome. I mainly use mine to edit vinyl samples. I'm able to clean things up as if the vinyl sounds i got were from a studio session that i would record in.

as a midi sequencer...adobe audition is garbage.........don't even use it for that.

leedsquietman wrote:The best wave editors are on PC.

That's a very ill educated assertion - there are some significantly overlooked audio editors out there which simply don't run on windows (Audiofile Engineerings Wave Editor for example). The fact your institution doesn't run those means very little, cost and familiarity are almost certainly more significant factors than it's the best in some way.

The good ones, which aren't free, some of which are very expensive and do far more than you need:

BIAS Peak Pro XT
Merging Pyramix
Steinberg Wavelab
Sonic Studio SoundBlade
Magix Sequoia/samplitude
Prism Sound SADiE
DSP Quattro
TC Spark (no longer made)
Soundtrack Pro
Adobe Audition
Soundforge

You just contradicted yourself in naming that list, which is almost all PC only or standalone DSP based gear.

I am not knocking Mac or OSX, I think it's a great platform and the best for DAW work overall - it's just that there are fewer options for good audio editors available.

And as stated before, we have Bias Peak XT Pro or whatever the top version is, and maybe because I'm used to Wavelab and Soundforge, I am not giving it a fair shot, but I just did not like it as much, the GUI, the plugins, and it was not very stable either. Soundtrack Pro is pretty good for ease of use, it just lacks a bit of depth for those more advanced features.

Audio editing is in fact a bit of a weakness in Logic too, given that the sample editor wasn't sample accurate in LP7 and before (fixed now in and that a stand alone editor is a better option for many tasks than the sample editor in Logic. Cubase and Protools are definately better in that area, although weaker in other areas.

@ Grappadura - You don't think you need this stuff - until you do !!! The problem with having access to the dedicated audio editors first is that when you get Live you really miss a lot of functionality, as opposed to just working with Live and working around the limitations of it's audio editing in blissful ignorance of the extra speed and power because you don't know it's there. It's a bit like the difference between a top line Mercedes Benz and a Trabant. Both will get you where you want to go, but the Merc will get you there faster and in more comfort.

I bought Wave Editor about a year and a half ago and pretty much hate it. It's very unstable and chokes badly on large files (30 minutes or longer) due to the real time graphics. Anybody wants to buy my edu license, PM me. I've been using Audiofinder and like it very much. Also use Bias peak for more advanced stuff. Nothing beats Adobe Audition though.

Adobe audition is amazing. Been using it for years.

I still (still!) prefer Cool Edit Pro to its bloated successor Adobe Audition.

i can't believe DSP Quattro doesn't have sample level editing.. i.e. the ability to 'draw' on the waveform to remove clicks etc.
surely this is one of the single most fundamental requirements of an audio editor.. or am I missing something ?

Illum wrote:I bought Wave Editor about a year and a half ago and pretty much hate it. It's very unstable and chokes badly on large files (30 minutes or longer) due to the real time graphics. Anybody wants to buy my edu license, PM me. I've been using Audiofinder and like it very much. Also use Bias peak for more advanced stuff. Nothing beats Adobe Audition though.

thanks. thats how i found the demo to be (crashed twice in five minutes) and the spectrograph is some kind of joke I think - try reading a frequency off that thing.. trying out audiofinder now

audio finder is pretty easy to use, and has some nice features - but no sample-level editing (or display) of waveforms.. It's more like an advanced librarian and loop creation tool than a dedicated waveform editor imho

amadeus pro also doesn't have a sample level editing feature.
Is it just me ?
surely the whole point of a waveform editor is zooming in and editing the waveform ? i can do fades, loops and effects in Ableton ?
weird

seems to me that for the mac you either

a. shell out about £1000
b. use Audacity
c. settle for a product which lets you look at the waveform but not edit it.



I look forward to Wavelab for the mac when that arrives.