I have only one thing to say about Bias Peak LE: don’t even consider it!
You’re paying good money for a crippled demo of Peak Pro. It is such a bait-and-switch that it seems very underhanded. Most of the features from the Pro version are disabled, but the nice folks at Bias left them all in the menus (grayed-out) so you could see exactly what you’re missing. As an extra bonus, the manual also includes full coverage of all the program’s features, helpfully sprinkled with “PRO only” throughout.
To add injury to insult, the interface is very awkward and time-consuming to use. For instance, Peak offers a handy visual interface for configuring fades and other transitions between tracks… which is PRO-only. This leaves a tortuous list-based interface which requires you to enter your fade lengths manually, and subtract them from the start time of the next track (or something like that – I only bothered setting up one disc in Peak before finding other tools).
The PEAK LE user interface
Do yourself a favor and pass it by… there are plenty of much better options
OK, you get my point. Anyways, Peak LE is touted as a full-featured audio editing suite, for anything from recording & processing audio from vinyl or cassettes to mastering & burning a “Red-Book” CD pre-master.
Peak LE provides support for VST and AU plug-ins, which is great. However, the LE version allows you to use ONE plug-in on your audio at a time, and the program comes bundled with ONE plug-in: Bias Freq-2, a 2-band parametric EQ. Wow! There’s a selling point. It also has a variety of basic DSP effects that you can apply to your audio, including normalization, EQ, fade in/out, and reverse. Most of the interesting effects are (you guessed it) PRO-only. It also does not provide any audio analytic tools, which are essential in a serious audio editing suite.
Do yourself a favor and pass it by… there are plenty of much better options (including a number of freeware/shareware editors).
Sound: 7
Feature: 3
Versatility: 5
Simplicity: 3
Playability: N/A
Reliability: 7
Control: N/A
Pro AudioUnit and VST plugins
3 Comments
what would you recommend instead?
Hey Mike – for simple stereo editing, and burning quick test discs or whatever, I use Amadeus Pro (I think it may be Mac-only). For mastering-type editing (equalizing/compressing finished tracks), I bring the final tracks as stereo files into Logic Studio and do all of the mastering there. You could use any full-featured DAW of your choice, probably your main limitations would be the quality of your plug-ins, your monitoring setup, and your ears. :) Actually, I do some of that work in Amadeus too, because Amadeus has some nice built-in analytical tools – I especially like the sonogram in Amadeus because I can visually compare the frequency distribution of the track I am working on to a reference track. As far as creating the final output for duplication, I think most any program you can do the editing in these days can burn you a good disc. Maybe someone else has a better recommendation for that…
Also… if you run Windows on a Mac I’d recommend Soundforge. There is very little that app can’t do. A free 2-track editor called Wavosaur is also pretty fantastic.