Hi
i have a question
it's my inquisitiveness, curiosity

which is the best audio editor ? for a pro job

i knew wavelab was the best

could somebody give some opinions, ideas



thanks , kind regards

I know some record studios use ProTools: http://www.digidesign.com/

What type of audio editor?

If a wave editor (with potentially some multitracking), I think Cool Edit/Audition/that newer Adobe thing and SoundForge are also popular options.

SONAR 6 Producer Edition.
ProTools doesn't come close. To bad it's becomed the "industry standard".

most recording studios i've seen/worked in used logic (mac) for recording and wavelab (windows) for editing/mastering.

protools actually was some kind of a standard 10 years back, but today? i don't think so.

Adobe Audition looks like it is something that professional type people would use.

Well, I make my living doing recording/editing so here's my 2 cents:

I prefer Adobe Audition 1.5 (which began life as CoolEdit) for the majority of destructive 2 track wav editing. There is Audition 2.0 but it's a lot more bloated and slow. I use it when I absolutely need a few of its really useful features.

I prefer Sonar 6.2.1 for my multitrack work, eg. song production, video soundtracks, that sort of thing.

ProTools is excellent, and it is an industry standard. It probably has the best multitrack recording and editing capabilities of any program out there. I don't use it because it is overpriced (IMO, of course) and because it will only export audio in real-time. That's a deal-breaker when working on tight deadlines.

I tried Wavelab and SoundForge, but I just couldn't get used to them. CoolEdit (and thus Audition) just worked the way I wanted to.

Audacity seems to work for some people, but it always crashed on me. I tried its stable versions under both OSX and WinXP but it was never stable.

Take that however you will.

if all you wanna do is edit then go with soundforge. i've tried the bulk of professional editors out there and the interface and simplicity of it is just a dream and it never compromises on quality. wavelab is very good but more geared towards mastering, likewise for samplitude. audition's the cheapo editor's choice, professional editing on a budget. don't get shit like protools or cubase or vegas (basically sequencers/dmws) for editing. these things are meant for tracking (though you can obviously do some editing with them), they're huge in size and memory and ahem cost. not for standalone editing for sure.

I was under the impression Magix Samplitude pro/Sequoia played a big role amongst the wave editors/multi trackers; was I wrong?

I'm curious, what does the Film/Video industry use?

Audition has the best feel, as most of what you will need is intuitive.
It is able to handle DSP comparably to Steinberg's CuBase [note: I only have SX, which came with the Firewire mixer], and much faster and more accurately than Sonar [short term comparison, plugged the Alesis into Cakewalk just for testing.]
However, I had some trouble getting it to accept the plug-ins I needed (Waves mono) so I switched to the much clunkier feeling and slower Sound Forge.

Have never used Pro Logic, as it only runs on Mac. (EAC does not run on Mac, so my hands are tied; otherwise I would be fawning over Linux.) Rumor (generated by Apple users) has it that Pro is still the best, and I recall that at the end of last year Google claimed that there were some 20% more searches for pro-logic, than there were for Audition or Sound Forge.

Just my own two bits. Have you tried Googling for threads on other forums?

I believe Sound Forge is the best for Audio editing / detailed work, whereas Wavelab sufficies for simple cropping / resampling operations as it is slightly quicker and better at saving files. For Multi-Tracking, I use Cubase SX, which admittedly can be sluggish on a poor PC, but can do amazing things once you've learnt how to use it.

1. Adobe Audition
2. DC Six (Diamond Cut)

Probably the one the "pro" you're dealing with already uses; failing that, the one you're most proficient with.

Pro Tools is pretty common, sort of a de facto standard -- excellent multi-track mixer, not quite so great as a waveform editor. Free version out there for Macs and Win 98.

Adobe Audition has lots of followers in the radio production world, though it's not the obvious low-cost choice that Cool Edit once was since Adobe bought it added major $$ to the price.... A great waveform editor: the noise reduction function can do incredible things. (Disclosure: it's what I use, mainly because it's already paid for and I have lots of presets and project templates built up...)

Audacity isn't too shabby for free; supports VST plugins so it can be expanded.

Sequoia.

here wavelab is not very popular

i second tarsier... Audition v1.5 is the fastest that I've seen. Speed counts the most for me, and of course that there are no quality problems with it.

Sequoia is also something I use for mixing tracks for a CD master from pre-mastered stuff (if i did them or not, but usually because i've done them). The way it mixes is mathematically sound (two 16-bit sources into 17-bits, two 24-bit sources into 25-bits, etc), and the quantization of Pow-r dithering is of course fantastic. I almost always use Apogee UV22 HR afterwards though, but still it's really hard to ABX the Pow-R dithering against UV22 HR (and that doesn't prove which, if either, are "better")

I used to have a SADiE PCM-4M for analog transfers and cd mastering, but got rid of it, but that's also a fantastic editing & mastering platform. Especially for surround apps with the 8+ channel units, right up into the 64 channel units which could certainly be used for critical multitrack recording. Not cheap. (as much as i'm heading away from proprietary hardware, the LRX2 with 64-channel MADI interface looks amazingly sexy)

Mainly now I'm just using Audition v1.5 and Apogee hardware. Winamp as a shell for my mastering components - before you laugh, test it with in_wave v2.06 (or earlier, which doesn't force bit depth or dither) and out_disk and you'll find it's a 1:1 copy. Sequoia for cd mastering and burning (at 2x) or Burrrn for non-mixed cd masters (at 2x).

my fave wave editor is sound forge although i'm not 100% happy with it (anymore). i chose it back in the days when it was considerably faster than cool edit and stuck with it. i see lots of recommendations for audition v1.5, especially for its speed (i thought it was just cool edit in disguise, therefore haven't given it attention), saying v2.0 is slow and bloated, but from what i can see the last version is v3 - any thoughts on that one? even slower than v2 or is it optimized and leaner like v1.5 (small chance of that i presume, but still)? does it perhaps have some other substantial upgrades that would still make its usage worth while, despite the presumed bloat, or would i still be better off hunting for the old version?

erm "Pro Logic" is an analog matrix surround sound format invented by Dolby. I think you mean Logic Pro. Logic used to be developed by Emagic until Apple bought them in 2002, the last windows version was 5.

This entire thread seems to confuse multitrack music productions systems with audio editors and mastering tools. There are of course programs which try and do both.

If you want to record and edit audio rather than sequence it then the options in no particular order are:

Steinberg WaveLab (Stereo, Windows Only)
AudioFileEngineering Wave Editor (Stereo, Windows Only)
Bias Peak (Stereo, Mac Only)
Adobe Audition (Multichannel, Windows Only)
Apple Soundtrack Pro (Multichannel, Mac Only)
Sony Sound Forge (Multichannel, Windows Only)
Sonic Studio Sound Blade (Limited multi channel, Mac Only, ultra high end if you have to ask the price you can't afford it)
SADiE (Multichannel, Windows only, ultra high end if you have to ask the price you can't afford it)

If you want something that does sequencing and MIDI as well then again in no particular order

Cakewalk Sonar (Windows Only)
Magix Sequoia (Windows Only)
Apple Logic Pro (Mac Only)
Steinberg Nuendo (Cross platform but happiest on Windows)
Digidesign ProTools (Cross platform)

Most studios will have multiple applications as no single product does everything required from multitrack sequencing through to mastering.

Nope. Still is very much the "industry standard" -- and it's "Pro Tools".


Yep. Some confusion here regarding digital audio workstations (DAWs) and audio editors. Pro Tools, Nuendo and Logic Pro are best defined as DAWs (digital audio workstations); WaveLab, Peak and Sound Forge are best defined as audio editors; and applications like Audition dip into both realms.

I personally use Pro Tools and BIAS's Peak Pro when I'm in Macland, and Pro Tools and WaveLab in the PC world. As it stands now, I prefer Peak.

I just wish there was something for the Mac that does what Audacity does and wasn't a buggy pile of crap with a dubious internal architecture.

Soundtrack Pro looks as though it does some of what I want but it doesn't look as though you can apply arbitrary envelopes to the duration of a clip which is the feature I really want that Audacity has.

Have you tried Amadeus? I have a license for Amadeus II (haven't tried Amadeus Pro) and I find it to be intuitive, fast and powerful.



This should read, 'Mac Only'

Nobody has mentioned Reaper, so I will. Teeny tiny download, very fast and very flexible, good stock plugins.

This falls into the multitrack recording and mixing category btw.

I'll have to say, that once you're used to it, Reaper is absoloutely amazing: you can pay hundreds for stuff like Cubasis, or take a short time to navigate the maze of menus in Reaper, which is totally free! Good favourite (despite my earlier post, by which time I hadn't discovered this!)

I think Adobe Audition or the new one err is it soundbooth.

In all the studios I work in (I am a musician) Pro Tools is still the standard, usually running on Macs. I cannot recall any local studios running Windows in the last several years - once OS X matured, the XP machines in studios began to disappear.

For simple 2 track editing I use Amadeus Pro on the Mac. Easy, intuitive and stable. Impossible to say what on earth "Best" means, it depends upon what tasks you have in mind. No need for overkill.

wow, Reaper looks pretty sweet. I'll try it out later on. Thanks for the linkage.

also i agree, "best" will never be found, and "audio editor" is too broad. i gotta wonder how many other threads already exist on the subject here.

wavelab for me
chaining many vst and dx effects and changing parameters in realtime even on a slow computer is amazing

I was under the impression that almost every music industry studio uses ProTools on macs. This poses a major difficulty for me, trying to "break in" to the field of professional audio engineering, because I am blind, and ProTools on the mac is inaccessible to Voiceover which is the only Mac screenreader on the market.

(This is actually a somewhat major complaint both in teh blind mac community and the blind sound engineering community as it was once accessible but the move to Intel-based CPUs broke a lot of the things that allowed it to interface with the program; we were supposed to get an update on how the progress was going sometime in May but we didn't, score 1 for the industry not giving a crap. You can read more about it at http://www.protoolspetition.org/ and sign the petition in the desperate hope that it'll do some good, which i rather doubt.)

So, since ProTools is out (on the mac) what compares? The answer to all of these questions may be somewhat outside of the scope of a forum, but what *are* the differences between the various audio recording and editing programs? What features does one have that the other doesn't, and what makes one program's inplamentations of those features better than the same feature on a different program? Is there a website that I could go to that lists all of this stuff in better detail that would not involve me scanning through each manufacturer's websites and sifting through the layers upon layers of garbage salespitches?

Oh, one other thing--is the feature set of ProTools on Windows different from the feature set of ProTools on the mac?

I wonder how Digital Performer compares to ProTools in regard to screen readers. I've never heard about issues of screen readers on Macs, it's interesting stuff. I'm a personal friend of Steve Wolf (of Wolf F M) and he keeps me up to date on a lot of the PC broadcasting end of things and visually impaired use.

I've always preferred Digital Performer for my own recording and post use, and Nuendo for surround post when I've worked in studios that have enough money to have it.

I used FlexiMusic Mp3 editor, it offers simple audio editing capabilities. It seems like the best tool for the job.

In LA, it's about 99.9% Pro Tools. It used to be about 50/50 split between "old" Pro Tools (888 processors) and the "new" Pro Tools (HD). As of late 2007, I'd say it's now about 90% Pro Tools HD.

Virtually every major-studio motion picture and TV show you see around the world was recorded, edited, and/or mixed on Pro Tools. Like it or not, it's the standard of the industry.

But for music recording, it runs the gamut. You can record on just about anything as long as the A/D converters sound good. Few mastering companies use Pro Tools, since they prefer to work in 32-bit (or even 64-bit) mode, for processing.

--Vidiot