Audio Tools Overview[10]
There is a wide gamut of software for audio editing and format conversion. The software ranges from single-purpose utilities available via free download to professional digital-audio editing suites costing thousands of dollars. The following list is culled from somewhere in the middle—high-powered tools with accessible prices. The U.S. dollar amounts given reflect those at the time of this writing and are subject to change. In most cases, they should be used as guidelines only.
One of the most popular commercial audio editing tools for the Mac is SoundEdit 16 from Macromedia (http://www.macromedia.com/). On the PC the standard audio editor is Sound Forge from Sonic Foundry (http://www.sonicfoundry.com/).
Since Windows machines don’t have the same basic audio features that Macs have, PC users may need to invest in some costly audio hardware to do true multitrack recording. Once the hardware is added however, there are a number of good software packages from Cakewalk and other companies to record and process audio and MIDI.
- QuickTime 3.0 (Mac and PC)
The first essential audio/video tool for all web designers or multimedia producers on both Mac and PC is QuickTime 3.0. This is the first release of QuickTime to be fully functional on Windows. QT 3.0 comes with the tools for creating streaming video and audio for the Web. QuickTime supports dozens of file formats and there are a number of new codecs that come with QT that are ideal for the Internet (see Qcomp, ...
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