Diamond Cut Forensics Audio Laboratory

Diamond Cut Forensics Audio Laboratory is a comprehensive application made for audio restoration and enhancement. Mostly developed for expert users, it contains a wide range of filters and effects, in addition to an audio burner and CD grabber.

Wrapped up in a professional-looking interface, the program invites you to open a waveform audio file with the .wav, .mp3, .wma, .aiff, .ogg or .flac format, or a video clip (.avi, .asf, .mpg .mpeg).

You can add markers and labels, change the gain of highlighted areas, apply a fade in and out effect, or edit the Wave header when it comes to the format tag, sample rate, number of channels, bit depth, block alignment, and average bytes/second.

The software application also lets you change the file's sample rate, resolution, conversion quality and dithering mode, start a recording based on the time of day, create test signal wave files, convert a stereo file into two mono files or vice versa, as well as import and export presets to share with other users (e.g. averaging, bandpass, blender, compressor, continuous noise, declipper, dynamics, echo, enhancer).

A batch file editor lets you run a filter on multiple files at once, such as auto-leveling or big click. What's more, you can clean up a track by adjusting the scratch, crackle, hiss and humming levels, create a multi-filter from individual filters, manage virtual photo preamp settings, run DirectX plugins, as well as remove clicks, pops, large clicks, harmonically rich noise, and selected frequencies.

As far as effects are concerned, you can add realistic reverb and punch, adjust multi-tap echo and tone controls (level, exciter, bass, mids, treble), simulate tube sounds through a virtual valve amplifier, tweak a dynamics processor, expander and noise gate, make the track play backwards, combine the left and right channels, increase or decrease speed, change the time and pitch, and so on.

Forensic tools include lowpass, highpass, bandpass and bandstop filters with very sharp edges, a spectrogram viewer with frequency versus time, along with a declipper for removing clips from distorted files.

It's possible to quantize tracks for audio CDs, chop files into pieces, find and mark silent passages, normalize gain to 0dB, perform gain normalization with scaling, burn audio CDs or data discs, as well as rip tracks from audio CDs.

No error dialogs popped up in our tests, and the app didn't hang or crash. It used low CPU and low-to-moderate RAM but it sometimes carried out simple tasks slowly, like changing the main window's position on the screen.

Taking everything into account, Diamond Cut Forensics Audio Laboratory proves to be a reliable and resourceful application for analyzing, restoring and enhancing audio tracks, and it should meet the requirements of most experienced users.