technical questions about equipment and software used by voice talent who record at home - moderated by Beau Weaver
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My favorite audio editing tool for Voiceover

Guys,

As I have mentioned frequently, I am a long time hater of Pro Tools. If you are recording multiple channels of music, routing through plug ins and locked to picture, it sure is the right tool. But for recording and editing voiceover tracks, it is a needlessly complex and cumbersome resource hog. And those are it's good points.

I cannot count the calls I have taken from folks who are new to home recording, literally in tears, trying to figure out how to save a simple recording as an mp3 file with Pro Tools. And don't even get me started on how any OS update from Apple usually renders Pro Tools inoperable. And a year to support Leopard? Give me a break. But I digress.

I have done extensive testing of virtually all the audio editors for Mac OSX, including, Logic, Soundtrack Pro, Peak, Adobe Sound Booth, Sound Studio 3, Wave Editor, Amadeus Pro, etc. On the PC platform, I was a long time fan of Sony Sound Forge, but they do not have any plans to port the app to Mac. Peak has it's fans, but it crashes regularly, and support is spotty. I was liking Sound Studio 3 a lot, but there were some bugs, and omissions and the developer did not respond to support requests at all. All of the above programs have their strengths and weaknesses, but for the way I like to work, they were just not quite right.

Anyway, I have been working with a software developer to perfect a suite little app that I just love, and I want to pass it along to you. For my money, the best tool for recording and editing voiceover is: TwistedWave. http://twistedwave.com And, the price is 49 Dollars!*

It loads in about one second. No changing cursors into different tools. It works like a word processor. It saves directly as mp3 files, and will convert between almost all important audio file types. It exports the selected portion of the waveforme as a new file, of any type you specify. Navigation is a dream. You can zoom horizontally in the waveform and zoom in all with the tiny trackball in the Apple Mighty Mouse. It will record the highest resolution audio, sample rate and bit depth your sound card supports. It works with any digital interface that uses Apple Core Audio. For the advanced user, keyboard shortcuts are customizable, and you can create and save customized effects stacks of AU plugins.

I have worked closely with the guy who created the program to make some ease of use tweaks and fine tuning. He has responded to every one of my requests the same day. I think if you spend a little time playing with it, you may fall in love too.

You can download from this link, and try for a 30 day evaluation period for free. A major 1.5 update has just been posted, with additional improvement in development.

I have been using this as my daily editor for some time now and it is a huge time saver. If you are also a musician, or music producer, then Pro Tools is obviously. If all you need to do is record voiceover sessions, quick edit and cleanup and ship off via ftp, then give Twisted Wave a try, and never look back.

Full Disclosure: I am a paid user, and receive no compensation for this recommendation, other than gratitude for a tool so ideally suited for the task at hand.


Beau Weaver

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  • Victoria, you don't. The cost and result of doing so are significantly worse than buying another non-USB mic.
  • I have a usb condensor mic. I now have a small mixer board xenyx 1202fx. the question. how do you change the usb mic to adapt to the xlr connection? thanks
  • I am getting what appears to be electrical noise when I record using Audacity and Cubase LE through my audio mixer into a Behringer U CONTROL UCA202 usb interface and my Dell Studio 36 laptop and a Dell Inspiron E1705. The problem is the same on both laptops. It sounds like unfiltered ac coupled with a whine of varying pitch.  I can hear varying electrical sounds when I type on the keyboard, move the mouse and scroll up and down on the screen.  These problems are not present when my audio mixer is connected to my main tower computer used for recording.  Any thoughts on what is going on and how to fix it.
  • Thanks Alexis. Will do :)
  • I bet someone on the Marketing for fun and Profit page of VU would have some suggestions.
  • How much do talent charge to voice an IVR for a small business? It's a very large project and recurring. Also, the client has asked me to aurally hear and transcribe the audio and redo (voice) it from a previous recording. The client found me on voices.com but phoned me directly. 

     

    Appreciate any comments. Pricing the client seems to be the hardest job on my part. Thanks.

     

    Kim

  • Hi again everyone! I have a mic question and I am hoping someone here can help me. I have a sennhesier e 835 which is a great vocal mic, but I was wondering how it stacks up against the shure Sm 58 for voicework- in particular video games. I have a rode ntk as well which is my baby, but the large diaphragm mics are too sensitive for over the top screaming in your face character stuff. Ideas? Any suggestions are very much appreciated!!!
  • The way I was taught to handle "P"'s was to think of the cute little stuffed animals from the mid 80's, baby pound puppies. (yes, it was that long ago, I'm feeling old now) But if you remember them you'll think about the cute little things and choke back the "p". It's hard to force the sound thinking of them. For those that are younger and don't remember them, there's probably a picture on google somewhere, lol.
  • Thanks Alexis!
  • My dad and I are big fans of Twisted Wave too, its very easy to use and the customer support is great. 

     

    We also have Adobe Sound Booth also and it has some great features but we do most of the recording and editing one Twisted Wave and use Sound Booth for the features when we need them.

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