BIAS Inc. unveiled in Frankfurt, Germany late last week Peak Pro 5, the next generation of the company’s professional stereo recording, editing and mastering software. BIAS also announced Peak Pro XT 5, a bundle that will include five brand-new BIAS plug-ins and several other of the company’s popular plug-ins.
Peak’s playlist has undergone several changes in the new version including a graphic waveform view with optional staggered or linear views with optimized Quartz-2D drawing and transparency, allowing crossfades and tracks to be adjusted visually. The playlist also features unlimited undo/redo, as well as support for keyboard triggerable controls for auditioning and nudging.
Peak Pro 5 also offers replication-ready CD burning with ISRC entry, writing CD track indexes, PQ subcode editing, CD-Text and other advanced features conforming to the full Redbook specification, according to the company. An optional extension will also be available to Peak 5 users allowing for DDP file export.
Vbox, Peak’s graphic effects routing window, now supports Audio Units plug-ins as well as VST plug-ins and some of the DSP algorithms in the application have changed including Change Pitch, Change Duration and Sample Rate Conversion, and new DSP items have been added such as Auto-Define Regions Strip Silence and Envelope From Audio.
Other changes in Peak Pro 5 include a new high-resolution Tape Style Scrubbing via CoreAudio; the Batch File Processor now enables the preservation of file resolution and type; a new Recover Audio File command enables users to recover some damaged files; and the New Region Split command makes the region creation process faster and easier than before. Peak also added support for Unicode, allowing the use of non-English file names — support for file names longer than 32 characters has also been added.
The Peak Pro XT 5 bundle includes Peak Pro, plus SuperFreq 4-, 6-, 8- and 10-band paragraphic EQ, as well as SoundSoap and SoundSoap Pro. The bundle will also include five new BIAS plug-ins: Repli-Q, Sqweez-3 and -5, PitchCraft, Reveal and GateEx.
Peak Pro 5, and Peak Pro XT 5 will be available in Q2 2005 — Peak Pro 5 will cost US$599 and Peak Pro XT 5 will cost $1199. Customers who purchased the full edition of Peak before April 1, 2005 can upgrade to Peak Pro 5 for $179. Customers who purchase the full version of Peak after April 1, 2005 can upgrade to Peak Pro 5 for $39. Upgrade pricing from other editions of Peak and crossgrade pricing to Peak Pro XT 5 will be announced at a later date, the company said.