GoldWave 5.20

Sound editing has always been one of my hobbies and thus I had worked with a lot of audio tweaking and adjusting tools. Many of them offer a standard set of features, but not all can compete directly with elite software like Adobe Audition. GoldWave is quite a serious competitor with a lot of abilities and advanced settings, all coming into a package with some additional tools as well.

This program has been on the market for a long time and has made quite a good reputation even in the professional environments like multimedia editing studios. Due to its excellent tools and handling of the audio files, this program has set some straight standards into the audio editing scene.

The support for audio files includes loading content with the following extensions: wav, mp3, extended audio (eax), Apple (aiff, aifc), Amiga (iff), Sun (au), Sound Blaster (voc), Raw (snd), MIDI Instrument Sample (sds), Sample Vision (smp), Dialogic (vox), Matlab (mat), Numerical Text (txt) , GoldWave Tmp file (tmp), AVI (you can load video files and save the sound from them!), FLAC Loseless Codec (flac), Ogg, QuickTime Audio (mov), Windows Media Audio file (wma).

It becomes very convenient to work with once you learn the keyboard short-cuts combinations which can seriously improve the speed and the productivity in your audio editing activities. You can fix damaged audio files and you can enhance the quality of the recordings from the cassette tape sources by using the noise filter tools. The included tools are among others the batch converting (which helps you convert many audio files one after another from one format to another) and the CD-Reader that is the best tool I have worked with so far for ripping audio CDs. I know that there are dedicated applications for Audio CD ripping, and the CD-Reader from GoldWave is just an add-on tool but trust me, it “swipes the floor” with other famous CD-rippers due to the highly efficient working procedure (even with protected Audio CDs!) and the advanced settings that allow the customization of the output audio files.

The control widow can work as detached or inside the application interface which is compliant with the new Vista GUI shell standard and you can see it as it is in the top image in this review. You can set various graphics renderings of the sound for monitoring purposes. You can set and adjust the proprieties of the soundcard control panel according to your needs. If you have a few audio files that need to be merged, you can simply use the File Merger.

Applicability: If there is a need for a fast and steady performance audio editor that literally change and improve the quality of audio files, GoldWave is the one I always recommend. Not only it has these capabilities, but also it comes at a much smaller price than other famous and expensive software.

Pro(s): GoldWave can convince you of its capabilities just by using its modules for 30 minutes and that’s not something I can say about most of the trial versions of software. It is the kind of software that owns anything that “moves” in the “audio files arena”. Beginners and professionals will be very pleased to work with it.

Con(s): None found…

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Buy: $45

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