Way back in the mid 90's I first heard of the shareware
audio program Cool Edit, from Syntrillium Software. This was in
the days when there were still more people on BBS's than on the
Internet (no doubt the younger among you might be thinking
"BB-whats?"). Anyway, I downloaded the program from one of the
many local BBS's at the time and installed it on my computer.
Even though I didn't understand most of the many features
offered by the program back then, I was impressed by the
extensive number of ways you could manipulate audio files with
it. Unfortunately for me, applying all but the most rudimentary of
edits and effects could take hours on the old 386 I had. In spite
the of great things I had heard about it, Cool Edit would have to
take second place after the copy of Creative Wavestudio that
came with my 8-bit, 11.25 kHz soundcard. Nowadays with a
fairly new computer however, all that has changed.
When you have a processor with a speed a lot higher than
25 mHz, you can actually see all the good stuff a program like
Cool Edit 96 has to offer. Of course you have the usual waveform
editing tools: cut, paste, delete selection, truncate (trim), reverse,
invert, amplify, et cetera, but it also offers many tools that your
average audiophile would appreciate and use. These include
filtering, noise reduction, normalizing, digital delay, amplitude
envelope, cue lists, 3D echo, flanger, time-stretching, pitch-
shifting, resampling, distortion, loop play, spectral analysis, and
noise and tone generators. Most of these functions have a whole
slew of settings you can tweak, and often you can save your
custom settings. Cool Edit also supports numerous file formats,
standard and obscure, and being able to save files in RealAudio
v.3.0 is a real plus for Web-oriented audio. The only catch is that
the unregistered version only enables two groups of effects or
functions at a time, the ability to save files included. In spite of
this, Cool Edit is still perfectly functional as you can simply exit
the program and start a new session using whatever other
function group you'd like.
If some of you out there are neophytes and don't
understand just how useful this program can be, let me use
some examples from personal experience. In September of '99 I
went about the awesome task of digitally recording most of my
music and comitting it to CD-R (for those of you who are curious,
the total was 199 pieces of music filling 13 discs, a labour that
even Hercules may have declined). I first turned to Cool Edit for
the ever invaluable normalizing function, which is a necessity if
you want to optimize the output of your recordings without
compression. I soon found myself regularly using other features
that I had never seen a use for in the past. I applied the
amplitude envelope to create customized fade-ins and fade-outs,
analyzed statistics to find possibly clipped samples, used
moderate noise reduction to clean up some my noisier VHS
mixdowns, and monitored the recording levels with the built-in
VU meter. Now my music will sound as good as can be, short of
taking my mixdowns to a pricey mastering service.
Another example: there was this incident where I wanted to
sample a macaw sound from a recording off television, but it was
tainted by this guy who was talking (wretched interview show...
let the bird speak!). Cool Edit 96 allowed me to see the frequency
content with the spectral view and then filter out most of the
frequencies produced by the human, leaving the macaw sound
intact and crytal clear. On top of all that, Cool Edit also deleted
selections much faster than Creative Wavestudio could on the
same computer.
If you like sound and haven't downloaded the shareware
version of Cool Edit 96, log on to the Internet and do so now!
Syntrillium should be proud. They've created perhaps the best
single audio application you can DL. And who knows... maybe I'll
actually register my copy someday!
You can download Cool Edit 96 at:
ftp://ftp.syntrillium.com/pub/cool_edit/c96setup.exe
