Fission 1.5

I miss SoundEdit16!

I agree with the previous poster....! There just hasn't been anything quite like it since.

I think Audacity works fine for most tasks. $32 for the occasional lossless edit is a little too much for me.

No sleight against Rogue Ameoba though. They're a great company

Fission is a solid app though it is a bit short on features, if I do say so myself. I'm the creator of Sound Studio, so I may be a bit biased. Audacity is open source and suffers from an inconsistent and complicated user interface. Sound Booth is still a beta version not yet prime-time, and is going to cost several hundred dollars anyway.

Here's a recent review of Audacity to add some more "subjective objectivity" to the discussion.

http://www.atpm.com/13.04/audacity.shtml

I think most people miss the point of Fission. It's a weird app. It's not in any way comparable to SoundForge on a PC, or Audacity on any platform. Fission has a limited repertoire of features, but they're incredibly useful features and the program is very easy to use.

I wanted a simple way to re-cut very long MP3 files, put in fades, etc, without having to keep multi-gigabyte WAV file masters on my hard drive, then having to wait and wait while those WAV files were re-encoded to MP3 when I was done. Fission kicks butt at these kind of tasks, but it is not an audio editor in the same sense as Audacity or SoundForge. It can't be, by the simple nature of its non-destructive, no generation loss editing.

Rogue Amoeba makes really great software. Hell, I own Audio Hijack Pro and literally never use it. But it's so cool! And because I owned that, I got a deal for Fission, something like $12 or $16... Very nice. Rogue Amoeba always listens to their customers and appreciates them. Giving special deals to customers who already own your other products is always good business. Other Mac developers, are you listening?

PS: I swear I am not in any way associated with Rogue Amoeba. I just own and like their products.

matthew_treder and walkerjs are right about Audacity. All the tools are solid, but the interface is sketchy at best. In some places it's just downright in the way.

Fission, like everything from Rogue Amoeba, looks great and I'm sure it works great. But it seems short on features. The only thing I can see using it for would be editing without re-encoding. However, I need that so rarely that $32 is just out of the question.

I had high hopes for SoundBooth, but until it supports multi-tracks, I'll pass (and from what I understand, they have no plans to do so).

My favorite audio editor from years back is SoundEdit16 - just simple, easy to use and enough options to handle 90% of my tasks. I've been looking for a (affordable) replacement for a long time. Every time a new one shows up (SoundBooth, Fission), I get my hopes up, but no one seems able to hit the right balance between features, ease of use and price. SoundStudio would be the perfect editor for my needs, but Burning Monkey has the idiotic idea it's worth $80.

So...still waiting for the perfect mid-range Mac audio editor...

Why not use GarageBand? It has all the features I need...

Audacity is quite a fine audio editing program for the price (free!) It does multi-track to overlay/mix, though I'm sure the pay-software has much more powerful features for those who need it but I've used it on a Mac for years now for basic stuff (like breaking out individual tracks from a recording, or fixing the occasional hiccup.)

The main problem I have with Audacity on a Mac is that it's not a very "Mac-like" application (something which until I switched I wouldn't have really cared about two years ago; if it did what I needed who cares about the "Mac-ness" of the app? Well, now I do.) Little things like it won't save to long file names that the OS will allow, or that my side-scrolling mouse doesn't work with tracks. With tracks that can be upwards of 30 minutes to an hour and a half you'd think that side scrolling would be a very logical thing, but no I have to zoom out/zoom in or drag a slider.

Still, it does what I need it to do for free and I know how to use it, so sorry Rogue Amoeba, your AHP is great and I paid for that one, but for post processing I'll stick with the free one.

What I like with Fission: it can edit AACs w/o de- and encoding. I use it mostly for splitting files for iTunes. It is extremely easy to use and does the trick w/o hassle. So for me its worth its price.

mk

Audacity: Free
Fission: $32
The self-satisfaction of not spending $32 and thus feeling like you've somehow made $32: Priceless?

I had installed the trial early, but didn't even bother using it after I read this:

"*Before purchase, the quality of audio saved with Fission will be intentionally degraded with a series of audio fades."

How am I supposed to evaluate intentionally broken software?