Cool Edit Pro 2

Cool Edit Pro 2.
Published by Syntrillium.

Available at $279 in a boxed CDrom version or as a download for $249 from www.syntrillium.com.
Upgrades available for users of Cool Edit Pro 1.x and Cool Edit 2000.

Test machine: PIII 733 mhz, 512 mb ram, win98SE, Lexicon core2 audio interface.
Reviewed by David Mondrup AKA monsdrum

What’s Cool Edit Pro?

CEP bosts to be a two-in-one solution for anybody running a PC-based DAW; with CEP you get a stereo mastering program/wave editor as well as a multitrack audio sequencer (though no MIDI tracks available). At a price substantially lower than any of the other sequencers or wave editors on the PC market, it seems to be aimed directly at competing with all the major software companies out there. However, things are not always what they seem...

The Cool approach

The CEP GUI consists of two main editors; logically, one is reserved for single wave-editing (called edit view) while the other one deals with multitrack editing (multitrack view) . Toggling between the two is easily done by clicking a large button in the upper left corner of the screen, or by simply tapping F12 on the keyboard. A file list gives you an easy overview of what’s loaded into memory right now, and let’s you drag and drop stereo or mono audiofiles onto the multitrack window - nice’n’easy.

The toolbar at the top of each window is a very configurable feature. Left-click anywhere in the toolbar, and you’ll have access to inserting buttons for all commands available by normal menu selection.

Users of CEP 1.x will note the new extra windows in both edit and multitrack view. Most notably the organizer window, which keeps the aforementioned file list, as well as a list of all effects available to the current view (single- or multitrack), and even a favorites list, that let’s you store cool preset’s for your effects for later use. Just having the file list in a fixed window is a great improvement in my opinion. The old float window in CEP 1.x always seemed to get in the way, and I found myself opening and closing it a lot of the time. However, if you liked the old style better, you can take advantage of another new feature in CEP 2; the customizable GUI. Many parts of the interface, including the organizer window, the transport bar and the position display among others, can now be rearranged at will, turned on and off, and transformed to floating windows if you like that better.

Let’s start our tour round this app by looking at the

Multitrack view

This let’s you record, arrange and mix up to 128 audio tracks, all of them stereo or mono as you wish. You can record audio onto the individual tracks through your audiointerface, or you can drag’n’drop audiofiles from the organizer window directly on to the tracks, where they will snap to other audiofiles. Multitrack recording and playback is supported, and although I didn’t succeed in tracking down info on what drivers are accepted by reading the manual or the website, there are certainly no problems working with the multitrack facilities of my Lexicon Core2 18 channel interface; other owners of that audio card will know that this is a pretty sure sign that the program will work with just about anything that delivers audio data. You also have the option to import standard MIDIfiles and have them play back on any device you may have connected to your PC. However, apart from a few routing options you cannot edit or record MIDI.

Taking advantage of a feature called background mixing, CEP claims to be far more CPU efficient than other multitrack audio editors, supposedly giving you a higher track count than you would achieve in other audio sequensers (such as logic or cubase). The idea is to have the CPU constantly working on mixing what’s on the multitrack view, and each time you make a change you can follow the progress of the background mixing in a green status indicator that fills up as the mix is calculated; I haven’t taken this to the test myself, but reports are that this is indeed working the way it should.

So, what’s new in the multitrack?

The guys at Syntrillium have been working hard to implement a lot of new features that seems to aim at making CEP a fully fledged DAW, that will let you track, edit and mix a given project entirely within the app. Most notably, the multitrack editor now supports realtime effects, and even ships with a selection of standard effects - such as reverbs, dynamic processors, EQs/filters, and a few special fx - in the typical thorough CEP fashion. Like in single edit, direct-x is also supported for realtime use.

Just as important, there’s a whole new routing structure that allows you to mix more like you’re used to it in other app’s or on hardware mixers. There’s a mixer window with dedicated track EQ’s (apart from the ones in the realtime fx section), an effects rack section for each channel, and the odd number of 26 busses that can be used for grouping channels.

In other news, we find the new loop feature, which looks a lot like some of the other loop music apps out there. Finally, there’s also a customizable metronome, that let’s you define your own click pattern using supplied sound sets.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the

Single edit

CEP’s main claim to fame is the wave editing facilities. It contains all the edit features one would expect from a modern pro level audio editor, such as cut/copy/paste/mix operations, loop point editing, file format conversion and many others. But moreover, the effects section is my main reason for recommending this app wholeheartedly. It gives you complete control over every conceivable parameter in every effect, and though that approach may seem a whole bit more geek-oriented than what is generally the norm in new programs right now, it certainly also gives you the results that you wouldn’t get in other apps when talking about those processes that are most likely to introduce artefacts in your audio. A few examples:

You ever tried to stretch tempo to extremes? Your usual settings choices in the time stretch dialogue of other apps would include a few buttons labeled things like “vocals”, “drums” and the like, which basically cover some presets regarding frequency and overlap settings; these may work OK when stretching by only a few percent, but what if you want to change the tempo to half the original? You would be very lucky if any of these presets actually hit what’s needed in the case at hand. In CEP, you can set frequency and overlap settings completely freely, or you can ask CEP to make a guess as to what the appropriate settings would be, then work you way from there. Listen to these results that were achieved by CEP when stretching a sample from an original tempo of approximately 75 bpm to 48 bpm (that’s a 35% tempo reduction! Try to do that by other means…). And remember, this is not dedicated time stretch software, but merely one out of many features in a wave editor.

As for noise reduction, you don’t have to make do with a threshold setting and some buttons to choose between 2 or 3 different noise types, as I’ve seen in some other apps. In CEP, you get to define a noise profile, either by loading one from another session or, more conveniently, by highlighting a part of your file with only noise in it, open the noise reduction window, click the “Get profile…” button to analyse your noise, close the window, select the whole file, then reopen the window and apply the reduction based on the noise profile you got before to the audio. The results can be remarkable, and as if that wasn’t enough, you get all sorts of parameters to fine tune the process. As a studio engineer remarked to me, when used well this effect can be a bit like “cleaning windows”. Admittedly, this approach to noise reduction is also available in other apps, but not usually at this price level, and then mostly as a third-party plugin or a feature of the more-expensive version (as in TC spark). In CEP it has been included for those past two years I’ve known the app.

If you can’t seem to get the right EQ curve by tweaking those knobs familiar to users of hardware equalisers, simply open the FFT filter and draw your EQ curve in the window. The FFT filter is a very cool feature in my opinion, since it gives you much more than just a window in which to draw a curve; you also get the possibility to morph between two different curves using a 3rd curve to control the transition process from initial to final settings, you can fine tune the filter to work out artefacts when using very steep settings and more. In other words; a completely definable EQ/filter.

So you want to make a nonlinear fade? In other apps, you would be lucky to get one or two alternative fade curves; in CEP, simply open the enveloper and draw the volume curve you want.

New effects in CEP 2 are a doppler shifter (for creating the effect of something passing by, such as a car or a plane flying overhead), a dynamic delay, a dynamic EQ, a graphic phase shifter and a stereo field rotator.

The graphical approach to effects is an ongoing feature in CEP. Whatever can be graphically represented is graphically represented and editable, with as many controlpoints as you could ever wish for. The distortion lets you edit graphically on a gain in/gain out coordinate system; the dynamic processor lets you draw your own dynamic response curve; and as mentioned, you can also draw your own envelope curves for amplitude as well as “pitch bend” - an effect suitable for DJ scratch effects and many other things.

Another main feature of the CEP effects is the almost scientific thoroughness that shows in the amount of parameters and the extent to which they can be tweaked. I would be hard pressed to find some parameter that isn’t freely adjustable, which is very likely to ultimately give you success, no matter what you’re trying to attempt. However, if you need to tweak something, but haven’t got a clue what “slicing frequency” or “FFT size” actually means, simply clicking the help button will provide you with an as easy to understand as possible no nonsense explanation of what the different parameters do. And, if you could care less if the FFT filter is based on the Blackman or Hamming algorithm or the actual dimensions of the room simulated in the echo chamber effect, all effects come with presets that can be used as are, or will prove as convenient starting points for your own effects.

Tweakers, look out!

As mentioned, a strong point with CEP effects is that any parameter is freely adjustable, and I do mean absolutely freely! Apart from giving you a great chance of achieving what you want, you can also do some seriously creative effects editing, that will take your sound to places where it hasn’t been before.
In the time/pitch window (where you do stretching and pitch shifting), the stretch slider can be set from 10 to 400%, which is far beyond what this is normally used for. But what if you actually want to stretch it more than that? Well, just click in the ratio box and type in the value you want - anything in the range between 2-5000% goes here. One very cool and alienating effect is to transpose your source material up or down by 5 or 6 octaves, then transpose it back again. Inevitably, some information will be lost and what is left will be pretty strange. In CEP, this is possible in one go for each transposition.

Want to treat your beat with a notch peak at 1.5 khz with a bandwidth of 20 hz downwards and 300 hz upwards, raising the peak point by 100 db? It’s certainly not pretty, but using the FFT filter in CEP, it’s possible (hmm … seem to have fallen into the “because we can” trap).

One of my favourites is to abuse the noise reduction by using the whole sample as source for the noise profile, and do a 100% reduction. Obviously, not much is left after this “trying to remove the sample from itself while retaining as much of itself as possible” process, but what is left can be normalised, and the result will be a sample that still carries the dynamics and rhythm of the source material, but not much else. Mix it in with the original source, and you will have an otherworldly soundeffect - a bit vocoder-ish, but not exactly like anything heard elsewhere.

Other cool features

Well, there are lots. The one thing I feel I have to mention is the stability. As is commonly known, windows apps crash from time to time. Though no worse than other programs I have encountered, CEP is not immune to this rule. Syntrillium have chosen to approach this problem from two angles; one is of course trying to stabilize the program as much as possible, which they have actually achieved nicely compared to many other programs out there; the other approach is to work with the facts, and include a crash recovery feature. This works so, that should you encounter a crash, CEP will come up with a window to the effect that to continue the current project, all you have to do is reopen CEP (at least this window comes up as long as the crash still allows windows to run). First time I saw it, I thought “yeah right”, but when doing as asked, I was much pleased to see a window that asked if I wanted to continue the session that had previously crashed. I have yet to see that feature fail on me; no matter what kind of crash I have encountered (and working on a machine with half a gig of bad ram in it for most of the past year, I can safely say that I’ve seen all available types of crashes, including freezes, lockups and the Blue Screen Of Death), I have always been able to pick up the session more or less where I left it, once I managed to get the machine running again. Neat feature indeed!

Conclusion

CEP is in hard competition on the multitrack scene for PC; Cakewalk, Steinberg and until recently also Emagic are out to get your money, and one has to admit that they do have an advantage. For big project work, I for one prefer to be able to edit and record MIDI, use VST instruments and have bus sends available in my mixer. Even with the metronome and the ability to have the timeline displayed in bars & beats, I don’t really want to bother with figuring out how that is all set up, knowing that the abovementioned features are (as of yet) unavailable, and that on my PC, logic is only a mouseclick away. To get the negative parts done while we’re at it, I much miss real VSTsupport (Syntrillium’s online support answers that request by providing you with some url’s for VST-to-DX wrappers), and I also miss an effects chain facility in edit view.

Apart from that, the CEP approach to multitracking has its uses and strongholds. First and mainly, the ease of use; I have on some occasions found myself doing multitrack audio editing jobs in CEP, simply because I didn’t need more features than what was available, and I didn’t want to bother with all the extra possibilities in logic. Secondly, it is very nice to actually have in depth audio editing available while working on a project without having to open a new program, with all the hassles this arises in today’s world of less-than-perfect audio drivers. And thirdly, having a multitrack facility readily available is very handy when wanting to layer samples in order to create new sounds. CEP’s multitrack facility is still in development, and it will be interesting to see where it will go in the years to come. However, this is not the reason I want to spend 249$ on this.

The reason why I think this app is worth every cent Syntrillium asks and more is the single wave editor. It seems to me, that in every other editor, some corners have been cut; either to cut costs on producing the app, or otherwise to make it more userfriendly, on the assumption that we, the end-users, are too dumb to actually grasp what is going on between the difference of a hall and a plate reverb. Granted, we’re not all scientists, but CEP gives us the option to configure our effects just the way we like them, and to just play around as foolishly as we want. Also, it doesn’t restrict the user by assuming what he/she wants to do. If you want to use a phaser that sweeps at 100 hz, go ahead and do it. Should you for whatever reason wish to pitch up your sound by 5 octaves, be my guest. Anything is possible - you can tweak your sounds in the most impossible ways, or you can simply just apply a little EQ and compression, if that’s what you need. Both things happen with a high quality output, and Syntrillium has made no compromises to make the outcome of these processes as good as possible - apart from making really weird noises, one of my main uses for CEP is hardlimiting for mastering, which is done better than most other limiters I’ve met; no unintended coloring or artefacts in the sound (if used within reason) - just a plain rise in the perceived level. CEP seems to me to be one of the most flexible audio editors on the market, and it is this kind of flexibility that makes CEP the wave editor of choice for me.