Slice and Dice Audio Files

Since the dawn of time, sound has established connections between all living things. It has forged its way straight into people’s minds and they discovered music. In fact, some of them believe that music is everywhere. All you have to do is listen.  Wave Editor provides the basic tools to handle sound. It will help you bend it so that the result pleases the ear and its audio effects will enhance the experience.

Audio editing may seem a very tedious job and it really is. Of course, when looking at the big picture, it looks like it was made only for professionals. However, for every complicated thing there is a simple, light and basic version, easy-to-use even by beginners. Operations such as recording, trimming, applying delay, flanger, chorus, distort, normalize effects or customizable equalizer will come in very handy for this type of users. The only problem in this case is the level of difficulty that an audio editing application requires in order to get the desired results. It has to be fast in execution, visually appealing as well as powerful and performance oriented.

Wave Editor is a free audio editing tool brought by Abyss Media Company. It recognizes few audio formats, such as MP3, WMA and WAV (PCM, ADPCM, GSM61, DSP, A-LAW or U-LAW) with 8 and 16 bits per sample, mono or stereo channels and sample rate from 8000 to 96000 Hz. The program also provides recording, converting or tag editing tools, but all of these will have to be downloaded from the developer’s site. Moreover, these components are not free, being distributed under trial licenses. Thus, they will not be taken under consideration.

Wave Editor’s interface is easy on the eyes, things are kept simple and in balance. Due to its simplicity, it offers few buttons (Open, Save, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Undo, Redo, Zoom In / Out, Play, Stop, Fade In / Out, Insert Silence, Normalization, Reverse, Invert or Amplify). These make the use of menus almost a thing of the past. Just below the button bar, users will find the visual audio track section and further below the Selection, Cursor, Levels and Volume controls. You will not be able to drag and drop your files on the main window, thus you will have to load your sound files from the Open button or the File menu.

Every time an action takes place, a progress bar will appear over the Main section, allowing users to view just how much time they will have to wait in order to continue their work. Once the audio file is loaded, it will take the shape of a waveform depicting the high and low volumes for the respective channel. I had a little surprise, though, will trying to play the sound file: I pressed the Space key and nothing happened. A quick look at the button bar or the Operations menu will inform you that the Play function requires the key combination of CTRL+P, just like in Windows Media Player.

The selection of certain parts of the file is done using the click and drag operation over the waveform. For exact selections, the program offers the option of choosing the Begin and End of the desired selection. To extract a portion of the track, you will simply use the Save Selected option in the File menu – the application will then ask you to choose a location and the file format (WAV or MP3) you wish to save that particular selection. Furthermore, it will provide simple customization of MP3 output files such as Encoding Mode (CBR / VBR) and Bitrate. The selection right click menu will facilitate your work by adding quick access to options like Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete and Save Selected.

Custom Fade-Ins and Fade-Outs are made by selecting the segment of the audio file and accessing the appropriate button and they take merely a second of your time. On the other hand, the rest of the editing functions (Normalization, Reverse, Invert or Amplify) will only apply to the whole sound file. For the zooming enthusiast in you, Wave Editor will offer a pretty nice palette. You will be able to zoom in on the waveform to the point where you will browse the track by the millisecond, assuring that you have total control over your selections.

During its execution, the application will not stress your processor (25% CPU utilization tops), nor will use more than fifteen megabytes of your system memory. The only options made available through the Settings window are Temporary Folder selection and the Colors customization capabilities. Users will be able to choose the Background, Scales or Wave Data colors. When it comes to audio quality, Wave Editor does a fine job by offering high bitrate MP3 or the WAV uncompressed format. Still, the selection of low bitrate for your output files will damage it and is recommended for specific purposes such as voice-only recordings or low-performance devices.

The Good This audio editing tool offers speed in task execution, quick access to software features and functions, accurate selections and a clean graphical user interface. It also delivers high zoom levels for sound file analysis. It is very light on system resources, making it possible to run smoothly on a vast array of PC configurations.

The Bad

The Truth