BIAS Inc. on Monday at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, Nev. demoed for MacCentral the upcoming release of Peak Pro 5, its recording, editing and mastering software for audio professionals. BIAS said the feedback since announcing the update in Frankfurt, Germany a few weeks ago has been amazing.
Perhaps the biggest change that current Peak users will notice right away is with the Playlist. While many of the changes in Peak 5 are under-the-hood, the Playlist has added visual aspects that are useful and readily apparent.
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 crossfade appearance is very similar to what Apple has demoed in SoundTrack Pro.
BIAS’ Zac Wheatcroft also demonstrated a new feature specifically for game developers. Console games for PlayStation 2 and Xbox need 28 samples of audio to be edited at a time. Doing this by hand leaves a lot of room for mistakes. BIAS’ “Snap” feature allows these pieces of audio to be selected automatically from the waveform editor.
“This feature alone will save our users hours and hours of work,” Wheatcroft told MacCentral.
Another useful feature for those that like to record their LPs or cassettes digitally is called “Auto Define Tracks.” With this feature, you set a couple of variables — like the space between songs and volume — and with a click, the tracks are defined for the entire album.
Peak Pro 5 has many other changes including 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.
Peak Pro 5 will be available in Q2 2005 for US$599. Upgrades for Peak purchased before April 1, 2005 cost $179; after that date upgrades cost $39.
An Extended Technology edition, Peak Pro XT 5, bundles the SuperFreq paragraphic equalizer, SoundSoap and SoundSoap pro noise reduction plug-ins and five new plug-ins, for $1,199.