Our Sound Designer Patrice tested TwistedWave, an audio editor and essential tool for recording, mastering, converting files and batch processing available for Mac, iPhone / iPad and online. Additionality you’ve got the chance to win a license of TwistedWave. Check out the review and join our raffle – We wish you good luck!
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For the final work stages of our BOOM Libraries I was looking for a program that is capable of doing specific batch processing tasks. A colleague told to me to have a look at TwistedWave because it can do a lot of diverse batch processing. That is where I heard of this audio editor.
I was very curious and so I directly downloaded it from their website www.twistedwave.com. You can check out the fully functional version for 30 days. I really like the concept of testing a software without any restrictions.
Overview:
My first impression was that the interface has a very simple and clean appearance. This makes it very easy for beginners and straightforward when starting off, because you only have access to the most basic functions. But see for yourself:
All the information you need is directly displayed: There is the transport bar with playback controls, record button, loop switch, undo and redo, zoom controls and a normalize, fade in and fade out button. On the right you’ll find a volume control, time display and an info button. If you press it you will see the following information window.
Metadata:
You have three tabs with different types of metadata. If you open a WAVE file you will have access to BWAV tab and Soundminer. Every field is editable so you can add your info to the file. Unfortunately the Soundminer tab is empty. The metadata of our BOOM Library SFX were embedded with Soundminer v4 and TwistedWave is only capable of reading Soundminer v3 metadata. Luckily you can see the metadata you wrote and saved in TwistedWave in Soundminer v4. This is not the fault of TwistedWave. The reason is the encryption that Soundminer uses. But as we have implemented the metadata in several other common fields that are displayed very well you will be fine using the given Music and BWAV information. Furthermore you can add metadata to several other file formats like MP3 or AIFF for example.
Why we use TwistedWave for our BOOM Libraries:
When the content of the library is complete, meaning all files are ready to be shipped, there are some last steps they go through. The first thing is to erase all previous embedded infos, like the metadata that is written into the file by several programs. Pro Tools, iZotope RX and many others leave traces. Sometimes markers are placed by a program. All this information needs to be deleted to make space for our metadata. So these are the two most important batch processing steps we always use for our latest releases. You can see the three actions in the picture below and nearly all the batch processing possibilities. You can save different batch processing steps and quickly open them.
What else do I do with this audio editor?
Besides the batch processing I like to use TwistedWave for playing back WAVE poly files. When I’m on a recording trip and back at the hotel or at home the first thing is listening back to what you’ve got and, more importantly, how it sounds. Let’s say I have a multichannel recording with ten channels and I want to check each microphone. This is what it looks like in TwistedWave.
You can directly see where the action is happening and all channels have a level meter. You can zoom and navigate through the file very easily. Listening back to specific channel or parts and also non-contiguous parts is no problem at all. You can simply click and drag a selection or double click a channel and you will only hear just that. You can mark selections of several spread areas you want, even if they are not contiguous. Just press and hold the alt or option key while you click and drag over the part that you want to add to the selection.
A minus is that it automatically pans the channels left and right. Meaning channel one is left, two is right, three is again left and so on. This feature needs to be controllable as most of the time I do not want it that way. A channel link or pan button beneath the level meter or in the beginning of each track would be perfect.
As I’m often recording with a lot of head room when using the Sonosax R4+ recorder I love that you can normalize each channel individually. Be it peak, true peak, RMS or LUFS (R128). You can also set a maximum gain and maximum attenuation.
What else can you do with this audio editor?
TwistedWave can do a lot more than what I’m using it for most of the time. You can analyze the audio file:
Or export it to one of following formats:
Besides that you can of course do all the editing, like cut, copy, crop, trim to silence and much more. Playback is also possible by scrubbing the cursor.
Last but not least you can process your audio with a lot of built-in effects:
Most of these effects are very common and self-explanatory, but I want to show you some particular ones that are interesting. For instance, there is the Custom Fade option. Here you can adjust the amount of the fade by percentages. For example starting with 20% and ending with 80%. I’m not sure when to use this but I did not come across it so far. A feature I’m missing is a gain curve that you can draw to adjust the volume.
In addition to the built-in effects you can use your own effects. TwistedWave can handle VST and Audio Unit plug-ins. As with most effects you can preview the audio by hitting the play or preview button. Another useful function is that you can choose what happens with the tail of the effect. If you want to add a delay effect to a specific selection – what about the tail? Usually the effect would only process the selection but with TwistedWave you can insert or merge the tail.
Furthermore you are able to build effect stacks and save them for next time. Would be cool to have the possibility to add the built-in effects to these stacks. But you can always use the batch processing if you want to implement those actions.
Summary:
Pros:
- Pricing ($ 79,90)
- Batch processing
- Ease of use
Cons:
- Soundminer Metadata v4 not supported
- Automatic panning of multichannel files
RAFFLE
Win one of three licenses of TwistedWave for macOS.
How? Simply write us an email with the subject line “TwistedWave” to raffle@boomlibrary.com until 19th of March.
The three winners will be announced and contacted at the end of March.
Good Luck! 🙂