AudioEdit Deluxe v5.01

AudioEdit Deluxe is an easy to use audio editor with bunch of nice features. The GUI is pretty simple, having only few drop-down menus and with all the features listed in there -- no weird shortkey commands to remember if you don't want to. As I'm not myself an audio freak in terms of editing and modifying audio clips, I can't say that much about the features and their quality -- basic normalization and fade-in/fade-out seemed to produce nice quality and took appx. 5 seconds to learn.

One of the nicest features in AudioEdit Deluxe is the ability to quickly convert audio files from format to format. Supported conversions include WAV <-> MP3, WAV <-> WMA, WAV <-> OGG, MP3 <-> OGG and WMA <-> MP3. Only thing that obviously made me yell "whereisit?!" is the lack of WMA <-> OGG conversion -- for some reason this has been left out. And of course the program cannot handle protected WMA files as that would violate Microsoft's copyrights and so on.. AudioEdit Deluxe also supports CD ripping as well as basic audio CD creation / recording back to CD-R -- how well does it support SCSI drives, etc is a bit of a mystery.

It was pretty hard to find any complaining from this tool -- the mentioned lack of WMA-OGG conversions is one and another one is definately the lack of information about the codecs used in the conversion process; now I can't tell if the tool uses some crappy Xing MP3 encoder or excellent-quality LAME encoder. Hopefully that would be added to the help file in future. Also, help documentation was pretty rough, it contained bunch of terms explained and some basic information, but lack of in-depth documentation is definately worth of mentioning.

Overall, I recommend this tool for anyone who needs to accomplsh basic audio editing tasks with simple tool -- program is shareware licensed, but the trial version is fully functional for 15 days.

It's almost there, but not quite finished yet -- maybe next version will change the rating from four to five stars, but now I'm gonna stick with the four-star rating. (this review is written for AudioEdit Deluxe v1.2 in Oct/2001)

Update for review 2nd November, 2001 Only few days after I reviewed the software, author updated the tool to include the WMA-OGG conversion and basic information about the MP3 codec in the help file (software uses LAME, probably the best MP3 encoder available at the mo'). I updated the rating from four stars to five stars, but I still nag about the lack of good newbie how-to guide.