After reading Jack Menhorn's review of Sound Forge Pro Mac on Designing Sound, I thought it'd be interesting to see who's using what in terms of audio editors.
Prob best to state what platform you are on as to avoid any confusion.
I personally have used Bias Peak for years and have found it to be very stable and it works well with plugins.
I use Audition on both PC and Mac.
I find it fairly intuitive, although CoolEdit was the first editor I used so perhaps I'm a little biased here. I really like the spectral editing tools, and find the native noise reduction tools to be very capable. It's also good to have the multitrack option within the same package - I'd always use ProTools for anything complex but throwing a few sounds together in Audition is very easy. Batch processing is ok too. Being able to create different arrangements with the various windows works well. Good meters.
No real complaints, but if you could take the editing features in Audition bolt them onto ProTools then that would be my dream program for dealing with audio.
I've used SoundForge before and found it to be very capable working on individual samples, but unless you're running Vegas alongside it's not good for creating sounds as it has no multitrack capacity.
I use RX2 a lot as an audio editor, usually I am just trimming, adding fades and some gentle noise reduction. For some reason I prefer the sound of the noise reduction in the standalone mode and I avoid using RX2 as a plug-in. The software is very stable and is really simple to use once you have read the manual.
I use WaveEditor for Mac by Audiofile Engineering extensively for all kind of audio editing, be it from cutting recorded samples from my field recorder, mastering recordings for CD, converting between audio-formats or creating libraries for software-sampler. WaveEditor has been replaced by Triumph on Nov. 1. and I am curious myself if it brings the power of WaveEditor to a next level.
The key features which make this audio editor such a incredibly important tool to me:
I used all of these features on a almost daily basis, they are great!
I used to edit in soundforge, but the Sony incarnations became more and more buggy, so I moved on to using the DAW of choice.
If I am Batch converting, I still fire up an old version of Soundforge on a PC (still sitting on XP) as it is stable and converts without fuss.
As I migrated to MAC and away from cubase and soundforge (work didn't support them), i couldn't find a wave editor that was intuitive enough for me on MAC and spent my time migrating from using PC editing with transfer to mac with Pro Tools mixing. As work relied on Pro Tools for everything, I kind of got used to editing within PT and then migrate sessions. To be fair, it was a compromise and a bad habit that I am now getting myself out of.
I was excited to see Sony release sound forge for MAC, as it has been my go to editor for a while now, but it seems that Sony have released a version that has taken a backwards step (ask Chuck Russom)
Audacity is...ok, and I am not being a snob here, but I find it clunky and there is nothing that Audacity offers that I can't get elsewhere that works better with injecting just a little bit of cash
Probably apparent from my review that I use Sound Forge Pro 10 through Parallels desktop, which is quite stable if not slightly inconvenient when it comes to file paths.
I recently grabbed Triumph but haven't had a chance to dig into it yet. I hear good things.
Triumph (formerly wave editor) has quickly become my goto 2 track editor. I work in game audio, so a lot of the design that I do is in logic A. because I'm quicker B. because I can't live without space designer. I then export separate pieces to build the sfx and make the necessary loops, cuts, trims and fades.
They are incredibly responsive to support as I've emailed them nearly every day with new things which i hope is useful since it's in its infancy. It has a neat photoshop style layers concept, and the great part about it is that the assets remain fully intact. FX that you add or fades that you do are completely non destructive. It's a great mix between a DAW and a 2 track editor.
My main bummer is that there is not a "document editing mode". It's proejct based, so you have to import all of your assets into a package, and then render out a finished file, etc. until this happens, I use sound studio to make very simple fades and trims.
I still use Cool Edit Pro 2! I've never got round to doing the jump to Audition. Like @Mark mentioned, I find the native noise reduction tools are pretty decent, and like some of the native effects. I tend to throw some recordings into CEP2 first to tidy them up before putting them into to Pro Tools or my library.
I do also have Sound Forge on my PC which I use for odd tasks but I just seem to find myself using CEP2 more often than not. I guess it's either familiarity or, again like Mark mentioned, ease of use!
audition mainly for the marking system and spectral view, handy when i have to take many parts off a long file and the spectral view usefull for removing mouths clicks or remove those unwanted sounds hard to view otherwise. however i used to be a big fan of soundforge when it was sonicfoundry.
I'm using Sound Studio. It's very intuitive, has multitrack capabilities, nice markers management, fast stereo and mono mix down function and all sort of useful features. I've recently bought DSP-Quattro thinking that It would have been a more powerful software but I found myself a bit stuck and unable to do simple things as quickly as I do with Sound Studio.
I've also tried Wave Editor and it's a good one
Well I'm also looking for a nice crossplatform editor. Nobody's using Wavelab?
