Archived from ListenSmart.com, November 3, 2003. Historical; not current advice. Software, prices and links are as they were then.
Source: Wayback Machine capture.
Utilities
Wave Editors/ Mixers
WAV Editors/ Mixers allow you to edit and enhance your files in a variety of ways to get the best possible sound quality. They also give you the opportunity to add audio effects before compression into the MP3 format.
Spin Doctor Macintosh Homepage | Download
Most CD-ROM drives can't perform digital audio extraction successfully at their top-rated speeds for reading data. In version 3.0, Spin Doctor allowed the user to select any of the drive's reported read speeds for DAE. However, high speeds often resulted in bad DAE.
Sound Morph capabilities: CD Spin Doctor now includes Sound Morph special effects to give your music a unique twist. These effects include:
GenderBlender: Changes the age or gender of a voice Metalizer: Adds a robot-like voice effect Concert Hall: Converts monaural to stereo, and widens the stereo image. Reverb: Adds echo and presence to a recording. TalkBox: Adds a talk box like effect. TimeWarp: Provides various ways of degrading the signal and adds noises such as pops, clicks scratches and distortion to reproduce '40s & '50s retro sounds. "Real Time" CD Spin Doctor: CD Spin Doctor allows you to take your scratchy old LPs, clean up the clicks and pops, then record the cleaned up music to CD. Now, with Easy CD Creator Deluxe version 3.5, you can preview and adjust the cleaned up audio track before actually starting the recording, allowing more flexibility and control of the recording.
Enhanced track splitting. In addition to the old option for threshold-based silence detection, we also permit specification of the desired number of tracks.
Ray Gun is a low-cost, high-powered noise reduction solution. Use Ray Gun for audio restoration, dialog clean-up, music recording and dozens of other applications. Ray Gun has rumble filtering and selectively removes hiss, hum, clicks, crackles, pops and other unwanted audioleaving the original signals intact. This is especially useful to anyone transferring vinyl or VHS audio to digital media.
WaveLab, as mentioned earlier, is a waveform editor with a generally intuitive interface -- most commands, such as deleting a section of audio can be accomplished with a keystroke (backspace) or with an option from a pop-up menu invoked via the right mouse button. It was much easier to convert Stereo WAVs to mono or vice versa with WaveLab than with CoolEdit (below). WaveLab is also an excellent choice for recording audio CDs. The program includes direct support for burning CD-R discs. A variety of plug-ins for noise reduction, declicking, etc. are also available. See the link above for details.
As mentioned earlier, WaveLab makes full use of Windows NT, although it runs well under Win95/98 as well. However, you get about 20% more real-time power when running WaveLab under NT. Better yet, the program can take advantage of dual CPUs under that OS. Interestingly, tests show that WaveLab is fully twice as fast on a Pentium Pro 200 as it is on a Pentium at the same clock speed.
WaveLab was the musical of the sound editors we tested, with functions that add a variety of pleasing harmonies, phase shift and flange effects, fade in/out controls and much more. Definitely worth a look and listen. WaveLab proved to be one of our favorite editors overall.
Mixman Studio Pro Homepage | Download
Mixman Studio is a digital music remixing application. Based on a turntable model (see screen shot), the program offers powerful features that simplify the remixing process, allowing you to create your own custom remixes and export them directly to MP3 format. Mixman's patented automatic beat matching technology allows for endless musical possibilities in many different musical styles. Tempo and pitch controls operate independently; for example, you can speed up the tempo of your tune without creating that "chipmunk" sound. Mixman allows you to combine multitudes of royalty-free sound loops to create professional-sounding music in minutes, then share your finished songs by exporting them to MP3, putting them on the Web, or making your own CDs. Version 3.0 features export to RealAudio G2 and Windows Media Audio, wide-band audio real-time processor, and more than 500 sounds. In addition to the sample music loops included in this demo, you also can download free Track Packs, which contain more samples that you can use in your mixes.
SuperSonic Homepage | Download
$39.95 To describe SuperSonic as 'Audio Editor' is insufficient. Although its small size, it is multi-purpose audio tool because it contains most of the functions that you can do with sound clips.
Wave Editor surprises you by recording, conversion and editing all Wave compression formats. CD ripping and encoding functions are newly added to this beta version. CD Player and Wave Editor support these functions. Together with your ears' happiness, Wave, Specrum and Peak Analyzers will entertain your eyes.
Disc Jockey makes you a professional DJ by providing audio queue containing cd tracks, Wave, MOD, MIDI files, and sub-queue's with unlimited queue size! If you have radio cards, you can enjoy full radio tuner functions including ten memory presets, station seek/scan, sleep and alarm modes.
It costs $39.95, but this beta version is free to try with no function disabled, no period limited.
Cool Edit 96 Homepage | Download
Syntrillium CoolEdit (download the shareware versions for Win3.x or Win95 here) As noted above, CoolEdit and CoolEdit Pro are good choices for basic audio processing, although advanced users may crave additional functionality. Cool Edit Pro lacked support for storing copyright info in waveforms, and it was unduly difficult to convert a waveform from Stereo to mono with the program. -- a task that was trivially easy with WaveLab.
Other Utilities
Mp3 to Exe Homepage |
MP3 to EXE is a very handy utility that allows you to attach a simple MP3 player to a desired song and combining them to create an EXE file. It is a great way to send files to a friend who may not already have an MP3 player.
With MP3 to EXE you can create self-playing MP3 songs (see screen shot). While a self-playing song is running, you can change its volume, scan it to a different time position, loop it, monitor its VU meter, or view information about it. The program also allows the user to change the appearance of the song on the target system. Version 2.6 features smaller EXE files and several fixes. The registered version, which costs $15, allows you to distribute the files you create.
Uncook 95 is an application that allows Netscape users to fix "cooked" MP3 files that were retrieved from improperly set servers. File "cooking" occurs when the server that you are retrieving data from is improperly configured and does not realize that a particular binary file type is indeed binary. As a result, the file is downloaded as text and contains line breaks that can affect MP3 audio quality. For more information about file "cooking," please refer to the Uncook 95 FAQ. Uncook 95 is postcardware.
Note: Uncook 95 should only be run on cooked MP3 files. If Uncook 95 is run on MP3s that are not cooked, you may risk damaging these files.