Audio editing on Mac

Well what type of audio work do you do? Mainly editing or do you do recording? I have heard of people running Audition under Virtual PC on the Mac, and for editing it may take longer but it will work.

But yes there are plenty of audio programs out there for the Mac, ProTools, Digital Performer(Both decent recording and sequencing programs) Peak(Good single file editor) Live(Well this one is its own category as I use it for my live sound work.... The list goes on. Would take some getting used to though and purchasing new software most likely. But yes there are alternatives out there.

Seablade

If you're doing any kind of Audio seriously you should have a Mac running ProTools anyway.

Havent you and I gotten into that topic before? Heh I will say I strongly disagree with that statement and personally believe ProTools to be severely overrated, with the possible exception of the TDM systems which admitedly I have not used(Someone got 10+ grand for me to spend?) But at any rate there have been very succesful audio projects that are professionally done on things other than protools(LotR on DP for instance)

Seablade

yeah but protools is pretty much industry standard right?

And there have been award winning designs done with software other than Photoshop and the other Adobe stuff too...but Pro Tools is the standard. :shrug:

I believe Peak would work for a single file editor, there is also Audacity on both windows and mac(And obviously Linux where it started). Main cool thing about audacity is its the only other program I have found thus far that has the spectrum view editor audition has, which I prefer to the Waveform view most of the time myself.

Dont know how sluggish it would be, I think the numbers I heard suggested somewhere between a 233Mhz Pentium and a 500 Mhz Pentium, but I dont know how accurate that would be, sorry. I know I did editing with audition for a while on an AMD 500 and it did fine but some of the more complex renders took a long while to do. Those were all small projects, or smaller things I worked on to build sound effects for shows I was working on.

Seablade

Industry standard hardly means best choice.

In fact it can be something completly different. I have yet to see an industry standard audio editor with spectrum editing like Audition has(And has really well down) or Audacity to a limited extent.

Another good example might be Photoshop and Gimp. While I havent used CS2 I have used CS and have seen Gimp as being quite capable of giving Photoshop a run for its money, in fact probably one of the few if not only peices of software that can. Photoshop may be a little better still, but for the price difference, Gimp quite often can be the better choice, depending on the work you do of course and how willing you are to use something other than the "Industry Standard"

The thoughtline that any serious audio work has to be done on ProTools is completly wrong in my opinion. Serious audio work can be done on just about anything, there is a lot of selection out there for good reason, and you should pick what works best for you, and not just assume that the industry standard is the best.

Seablade

(Who uses Protools for his audio for video work, but uses Ardour for his straight audio work and prefers it. Will probably be using Ardour for video too when that gets implemented.)