Wavosaur
I came across a good, cheap wavefile editor called Wavosaur. I haven’t done much with it yet, but the feature set is good, and there are plugins to get for it. I may continue to attempt to write an editor myself - at least this way I get to see somebody else’s idea of how it should be done. I may also figure out how to create plugins for Wavosaur. I remember how excited I was about plugins and scripting for Photoshop, but I never did figure those things out. I thought I would be writing batch files all the time, but with photo editing you really have to eyeball the material and make contingent decisions. The same must be true of audio files. Happily, I had already decided to pursue OpenAL for writing a playback system. Now, with that in mind, I have a better idea of how I would craft those sound files in an editor. We’ve still got some mysteries to solve with the interface. I didn’t see how to work with multiple channels (beyond the typical stereo), and a lot was grayed out - so maybe I have to pay for other features, and maybe I will decide sometime later that it would be worth it.
The comparison between photo and audio editors reminds me of my trouble with the workflow concept. Whenever you run commands in series on a data file, you are bound to find yourself down a dead end. Maybe you have trouble getting good results with the last command, then realize that the command thirteen steps ago should have been run differently. Some of these problems are easy to solve with the ‘mixing board’ or PS’s ‘layer comp’ concept: Keep components separated for as long as possible and commit to a mix at the last minute. In another scenario, versions can coexist as you run each command. Like forks in the road, or a binary search tree, you can retain all results. It may sound great, but it does use up more resources.
Posted by Evan Bittner Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:09:00 GMT
