It seems like there is a new audio software application being released every week. I have stopped trying to keep up with all the updates to the various popular audio applications. There�s CoolEdit PRO, SoundForge, GoldWave, and about a dozen other inexpensive software applications currently the trend among users. And that�s just for the PC crowd. Audio support is a barren landscape for the Amiga. ProWave has released several applications for the Flyer user, but there are only a handful of audio packages available for the Amiga.

Recently that has changed. A newcomer to the computer based audio engineers toolset is Soundprobe, available through HiSoft Systems. It is everything from a digital effects machine to a sound editor all in one package, and priced much less than the nearest competitor. Soundprobe allows you to record sounds directly to your hard drive, load and save in various file formats, move sections of the sound around via cut, copy and paste, mix sounds together, apply digital processing and effects from Echo/Reverb to graphic equalization and filtering and much more, and it does it for a lot less money that the leading competitor. And perhaps the best news of all to the Amiga user, it is available in BOTH PC and Amiga formats. Both the Amiga and PC versions of Soundprobe offer very similar features. According to the developer, the general appearance (ignoring Windows) is very similar (same types of graphs, excluding new one). The Amiga version has virtually all the same functions and effects, but is harder to use and find your way around due to the poor environment on the Amiga. It too has real-time, but not as good. All effects have parameters, but do not support the variations or preview features. The virtual memory system on the Amiga version isn't nearly as efficient, and can only handle about 10-15 minutes worth of audio without dying, mainly due to the older Amiga OS. The PC version can easily handle 3-4 hours. You can tell they are related, but overall the PC version is bigger, better, and much faster. Some of the PC features have been ported over to the Amiga, but the development environment is not conducive to much improvement. The Amiga version took two years of writing 140,000 lines of code, as compared to 94,000 lines on the PC version. Obviously, the PC version has the very latest developments and will be the future of Soundprobe.

Soundprobe supports the standard Windows WAV file format using 8, 16 and 32-bit sounds. Many other formats are also supported including: AIFF, IFF and AVR. MP3 files are supported using the Blade MPEG Encoder (not included). Soundprobe features multiple undo levels, and four different visual graphic screens, including a new color time graph screen which separates various frequencies into different user defined colors. This software has one of the fastest virtual memory systems available. The only limits are the free space you have, and how fast your HD and CPU are. You can edit over 2Gigabytes of CD-quality sound in a single clip and all the effects you add to that clip can still be heard in REAL TIME. This means you can try an effect BEFORE rendering it! Imagine being able to actually hear what the parameters of an effect will do to your clip in real time. No more �render and wonder�.

Soundprobe uses the familiar windows environment for context menus, toolbars and multiple documents. You can load/save collections of sounds to edit, and have them automatically load as you last saved them, including window positions and sizes, allowing you to support large sounds. The systems recording dialog box gives you access to triggering (start/stop automatically at certain sound levels), monitoring, continuous recording (records only the last xxx seconds), fixed length recording and indefinite length recording (records any length, up to your free space, or until you press stop). One of the few areas that needs work is in the metering section while recording. A faster response time would be preferable. This would give the user more information and therefore more control during the critical recording process. At the time of writing this review I have learned that the record metering section has been completely reworked and will appear in the next revision. Talk about �cutting edge�!

Soundprobe has all the standard editing functions, like cut, copy and paste, plus a library of powerful audio effect tools like EQ, reverb, delay, expander, noise gate, compressor, chorus, and several types of flangers. There are also effects which allow you to change the stereo image of stereo music, encode/decode surround sound information to and from music, reduce voices in stereo music. Yes, it�s a vocal eliminator as well. Can you say �karaoke machine�? In addition, more powerful filtering and restoration tools are at your fingertips like denoise, decrackle, and declick. These settings are perfect for archiving and repairing source material residing on old 78RPM records. I play them directly into Soundprobe and then do various �treatments� on the clips before playing them back to my CD recorder. It does an amazing job, but remember to allocate enough time to work on such projects. Sound design and repair takes more time than simple sound recording. But at least this program makes it easy to maneuver through. It is very user-friendly and some of the simplest things are considered, like a fade in/fade out feature. Just select the portion you want to fade in or out of and it does all the work for you. Soundprobe seems designed for the musician or sound designer who wants to edit, prepare, and convert their songs for the Internet or for use with the Flyer.

Then there is a whole section for "special" effects, such as vocoder, distortion, and pitch and time stretching. I found that using the �Brighten/Smooth� function, the designated track is instantly prepared for conversion to the RealAudio format, which is notoriously muddy on playback. But the really cool thing about the Soundprobe audio tools are the custom setups for creating and storing your �favorite� reverb sound or delay setting. All parameters for each effect are available and you can test your ideas all in real time. Once you have perfected the desired effect, you can save the preset in that folder. Ideally, as more audio engineers sign on to this program and create their own presets, these settings could be uploaded to the Soundprobe site and users could access the common database of presets. Furthermore, by using the Real-Time option you can apply an effect directly to your sound card�s audio input. This means you can plug in a guitar/keyboard or anything you like, and add an effect to it as you play, all without first saving the sound clip. In addition, you can also record this sound as you play with the effect applied as you hear it! And for anyone into sound design who owns a laptop, imagine the idea of using a laptop and Soundprobe as a powerful portable effects system!

Soundprobe is a fully featured digital sound editor with all the �usual� features. This includes selecting regions by snapping to grid points and even sound features. You can open multiple sounds, and multiple views of the same sound, and even view those sounds using different view displays (2D Time, 2D Frequency, 3D Frequency or 2D Color Time Graph). You can select and work with an entire selected stereo portion or work with either channel of the stereo signal. Soundprobe also has multiple undo buffers, limited by your HD space (which can also be user definable), undo also includes a redo feature so you can easily step through your edits. You can get as deep into the program as you dare; yet on the surface it is a very easy to understand operating system.

And for those of you using sound editors to create new sounds and �LoFi� recordings, Soundprobe excels. Several settings like �noise�, �dither�, and �crackle� can be combined with �resampling� a sound at a lower bit rate for those cool distorted LowTech samples which are popular with the current rap tracks. I regularly record my voice-overs for TV spots to Soundprobe then add whatever effect or processing I desire to the track before digitizing it into the Flyer. If the voice-over is a good one but clocks in at :35 instead of :30 I can time-compress it without changing the pitch. I have also taken a 3:00 music bed and seamlessly edited it down to a :30 for TV spot music beds.

Soundprobe can be used to analyze sounds too. You can use the screen graphs to get envelope and frequency information, and the statistics to gather overall information about the whole sound, or sections of it. In addition, the new color time graph screen provides a graphic display of the frequencies in different (and user assignable) colors. This is perfect for such applications as forensic audio, where you could compare voiceprint signatures by amplitude AND frequency at a glance.

At this point, allow me to express a few views on the development of this product. I have had an opportunity over the past couple of months to put Soundprobe through its paces. Upon first receiving it I considered it about the same as some of the other sound recorder/editors that reside on my desktop, but the more I played with it (like many applications) the more I began to discover some of its not-to-obvious talents. My opinion now is that this software is being designed more from the users perspective than the developers point of reference. Why is this the case? I believe it is simply because the developer has taken the time to not only listen to feedback from beta testers, but they are acting on that feedback and implementing new innovations �on the fly�.

For instance, in one of my email salvos with the developer I casually mentioned a program which could take a sound file and create a waveform graphic display which showed the sound�s various frequencies in a multicolor display. However, the software would ONLY display the waveform. There was no way to edit or shape the sound itself. It was just a pretty interface. I told the developer that if there was some way of implementing that feature into a sound editor that countless users who performed voice analysis in legal cases and forensic production would find it indispensable. In less than three days I was emailed a �fix� which added yet another option to the graphics display arsenal. The developer told me that years ago he had designed such a display for the Amiga version of Soundprobe but could not find an application for it in the real world until I brought it up. THAT is the kind of developer we users need and should appreciate.

Rumors are circulating that even greater new improvements are slated for Soundprobe in the near future, so readers can relax and know that this is not a flash-in-the-pan product. In addition a fully professional multi-track version should be available this year. You can download the full software from the Downloads Page (http://www.soundprobe.freeserve.co.uk/down.html) including a full PDF manual. This evaluation version is save disabled and has a time limit of 5 minutes on all audio output. When you purchase a keyfile from Soundprobe Sales at the HISOFT site you can immediately unlock the evaluation version, fully enabling the save and audio output.

Soundprobe lists for $83.00 and is available from HISOFT (EMAIL - [email protected]) http://www.soundprobe.com

Back to "Online Articles" Page

Back to CCS Home Page