I have used Ambrosia’s Wiretap Studio as my audio editor for many years. I love its precision paired with simplicity and in particular that its edits are non-destructive, equivalent to what Photos does with images.
Sadly it won’t run on anything newer than Mojave.
Has anyone come across a similar app?
I want to do simple edits of field recordings, apply crops & fades, normalize, apply AU filters. I should mention I already have SoundStudio, which is a destructive editor and therefore not good. Garage Band is too complex and too focused on music creation for my needs.
There’s a wide range of audio products from Rogue Amoeba, (which come with TidBITS discounts for members), these are excellent applications and Fission their audio editor is no exception.
Their elegant and simple Piezo does another trick WireTap Studio did, routing audio from an application or window into a file. The Audio Hijack app takes that up another level. Ah Ambrosia… you’re missed.
I had already tried both Fission and Audacity, but neither of them are non-destructive as far as I can remember?! Once you save the file your changes are ‘baked into’ it.
Yeah, Ambrosia is sorely missed, one of a kind really.
I’m pretty sure Audacity supports UNDO, up to a point. Besides, it’s good practice to do a “Save As” on a new project anyway, before you start editing your original files. If you can’t find Save As in the File menu try pressing Option or Command.
Just out of interest, why do you need non-destructive audio editing?
Most editors have something like the “Original” and “Edited” (or similar) files as separate entities. So the original never gets ruined and is always available to be duplicated and re-edited again, should that be necessary.
If you change your mind about any edit later, you can modify that particular one rather than going back to the original and losing all the other edits that you were happy with. No amount of undo steps offers that flexibility.
Almost all the apps I use nowadays work in a non-linear, non destructive way, and I would find it hard to go back to the old way of saving multiple full size copies as I go along.
