Cheaper or maybe free software.

[emmpet8]

Although I'm aware that good free software is available I wondered if any of this might be of interest to any members.

In the past I loved ‘Cool Edit Pro’ and was delighted when it appeared in Adobe Production Suite as ‘Soundbooth’ and later ‘Audition’, Adobe having purchased it from Syntrillium. I now use the CS5.5 version and think it’s great. The only (and major) drawback is the cost of Adobe stuff, but there is a ‘legal’ way of getting it cheaply. Sadly not for ‘Audition’ only, but if anyone is interested in video editing, photography, design stuff etc,etc, maybe they would consider this?

‘Adobe Production Suite’ for £314 instead of the £1800 price tag from the Adobe Website. This software package coemes with all the following progs:

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5
After Effects CS5.5
Photoshop CS5 Extended
Adobe Audition CS5.5
Flash Professional CS5.5
Flash Catalyst CS5.5
Illustrator CS5
Adobe OnLocation CS5
Encore CS5
Device Central CS5.5
Media Encoder CS5.5
Bridge CS5

Soon there will be the CS6 version available too, but the changes now tend to be minor in my opinion. It’s not much of a deal for anyone into sound alone, but as I do video editing and photography, it’s amazing value for money. It comes legally from;

http://www.software4students.co.uk/

I have no connection with this Website by the way. All you need to qualify is a child who is at school (reception to Y13) or a child who is a student. I do qualify genuinely (old as I am), but verification wasn’t very rigorous to say the least. (I did it properly, but I don’t think it would be hard to fake verification.) If anyone is interested I would be happy to forward the relevant information.

Apart from Adobe software the Website has other music (sound) editing progs at reduced prices. Verification for some of these is much easier than the relatively easy Adobe stuff.

Finally, I recently discovered my legitimately purchased version of ‘Cool Edit Pro’ by Syntrillium. It is from 2001 (cost about £300 at the time), but if anyone was looking for free software to try, I wondered if I could do an ISO copy for download? Syntrillium has sold it and it’s no longer ‘Cool Edit Pro’, so if anyone knows the legal situation on this let me know. If anyone is interested I won’t do anything until I hear from the mods. Just a thought!

[yeppie]

Finally, I recently discovered my legitimately purchased version of ‘Cool Edit Pro’ by Syntrillium. It is from 2001 (cost about £300 at the time), but if anyone was looking for free software to try, I wondered if I could do an ISO copy for download? Syntrillium has sold it and it’s no longer ‘Cool Edit Pro’, so if anyone knows the legal situation on this let me know. If anyone is interested I won’t do anything until I hear from the mods. Just a thought!

The situation as I understand it is that Adobe owns the rights ot "Cool Edit Pro" no matter if it is outdated and renamed. So please don´t get us in hot water by uploading software or linking to such an upload on this site.
Thanks for the offer and for asking.

[emmpet8]

The situation as I understand it is that Adobe owns the rights ot "Cool Edit Pro" no matter if it is outdated and renamed. So please don´t get us in hot water by uploading software or linking to such an upload on this site.
Thanks for the offer and for asking.

No problem at all. I had no idea what the situation was and that clears it up. I would never create links or offers that were illegal, or even doubtful.

[stynky]

If running Linux, try Audacity. The software is open source and comes with the same features as expensive software such as Audition

[yeppie]

If running Windows, Audacity is a good choice too although I prefer Audition.

[emmpet8]

Thanks for the tip about Audacity. I've never used it, but have heard good things about it. I like Audition a lot, as I used to be a fan of Cool Edit and also I do a lot of other Adobe work, Premiere Pro in particular, so the two work seamlessly together.

The version I'm using is a fairly new one and it's got some quite powerful features, but does need a lot of processing power. For all I know Audacity has it, but a newish feature I like, is the Spectral Frequency Display. It's an alternative to wave display in Waveform. The time is displayed left to right and the frequency from bottom to top. The amplitude is then shown by brightness of colours. There are also tools similar to Photoshop, such as the Marquee Tool for selecting areas of frequency and the Healing Tool. With the Healing Tool you can highlight specific areas of annoying frequency where the volume is too high and it will remove/blend them in with the surrounding sounds. The Marquee tool is also great for lowering/turning off the volume of phones, while leaving all the other surrounding frequencies untouched.

Thanks to both for taking the time to reply, much appreciated.

[reggind]

I used to love cool edit pro. I cleaned up a lot of old records and ripped them into flac files. I keep all my origional stuff in flac format and than rip it down to mp3, depending on what I am going to be doing with it.

Anyway, I had a copy of Adobe after that, but I never really used it. Actually I take that back. We watched the chipmunks movie and for shits and giggles I grabbed a copy of ragtime cowboy joe, and pitch corrected it. That was kind of a riot.

Now for any sound clean up or editing I use Audacity. It has some glitches, but for free I am really happy with it.

[Audio]

I use mainly three programs

Ableton (pay)
AVS Audio Converter (pay)
MP3 Direct Cut (free)