When storing sound files, there is always a compromise to make between file size, and sound quality. With the mp3 codec, for instance, you can compress a lot, but with a more or less noticeable degradation of the sound quality.

If the sound quality is a very important factor, you may as well keep the sound uncompressed, in a wav or aiff file, for instance.

In between these two extremes, we can find the lossless codecs, such as FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). Lossless means that the sound is compressed without any loss of quality.

Although TwistedWave fully supports the FLAC format, it is not yet the case with a lot of software, and converting all your files to FLAC may mean that you would have to convert them back to a more readable format if you wanted to play, or edit them.

This is where TwistedFLAC comes in handy. TwistedFLAC will show FLAC files as if they were WAV files. Any application can read these WAV files while TwistedFLAC transparently decodes the FLAC file in the background. If the WAV file was modified by another application, TwistedFLAC will automatically convert it back to FLAC, and update the original file.

TwistedFLAC also makes it a very easy way to convert many WAV to FLAC. Simply drag and drop a WAV file, or a folder full of them to the TwistedFLAC folder, and they will be converted automatically.

And the best of all this is that TwistedFLAC is available now here, and is completely free!

Enjoy!

Here is the list of new features and improvements from the release notes:

New Features

• Support for metadata.
• Added a signal generator.
• A configurable special pasting that automatically fades in/out.
• Added an icon for the files saved by TwistedWave.
• Added the ability to export the selection.
• Added the ability to create a new document with the current selection.
• Added the ability to choose whether to open an untitled document at application launch, the last visited, or nothing.
• When applying an audio unit effect, there is an option to tell TwistedWave whether to truncate, insert, or merge the tail with the rest of the sound.
• Added the ability to have an audio unit applied globally to all documents.

Fixes and Improvements

• TwistedWave could crash reading some WMA files.
• TwistedWave could crash when using the Apple Matrix Reverb audio unit.
• TwistedWave could fail saving a file in some cases.
• Fixed a memory leak leading to some crashes when reading some large files.
• TwistedWave could not read wav files larger than 2GB.
• In some cases, when recording, only one channel would be recorded, or the channels could be swapped.
• TwistedWave could crash when selecting a region extending beyond the visible area.
• AIFF files produced by TwistedWave could not be read by MaxMSP.
• When editing keyboard shortcuts, all the menu items are now enabled.
• The audio units GUI would not display properly in some cases.
• The ‘Remove Channel’ command now removes the channel the cursor is in.

New icons

Files saved with TwistedWave now have a nice icon. Here is what they
look like:

Support for metadata

TwistedWave can now read and edit the metadata present in sound files
in the aiff, wav, mp3, mp4, flac and ogg/vobis formats.

In addition to the music metadata, TwistedWave also supports BWAV and
Soundminer metadata.

A note about metadata support in FLAC files. Although BWAV metadata
can only be present in WAV files, and Soundminer in WAV or AIFF files,
TwistedWave allows you to read and save these kinds of metadata in
FLAC files. When the FLAC codec is used to convert files from wav to
flac, it used to drop all kind of metadata, and keep only the sound
part of the file. Since FLAC version 1.2.1, the option
–keep-foreign-metadata allows the codec to save all the metadata from
the WAV file in the FLAC file. These are restored when decompressing
the FLAC files to get back the WAV file. What TwistedWave does is that
it saves the BWAV and Soundminer metadata as foreign metadata in FLAC
files, so that they can be restored by the FLAC decoder.

Special pasting

When copying and pasting an audio clip from one place to another, the
transition can be a bit rough, and unpleasant. In order to smooth
things a bit, TwistedWave offers a special pasting command that can be
customized in many ways, automatically adding fades in and out to make
the transitions smoother.

The options dialog even shows a preview of what would happen when
pasting, making immediately obvious where the fades in and out would
take place.

A signal generator

A signal generator allows you to easily generate waves in many shapes,
such as sine, rectangle, triangle or sawtooth, as well as white and
pink noises.

The generated signal can be either inserted in the document, replace
or be mixed with the selected sound.

New audio unit options

There are two new options in the audio units window.

The first one offers the ability to apply the unit globally. When this
option is checked, the audio unit is not attached to a single document
anymore, but remains open for all the documents you are working on.
This can be useful in particular with visualisation plugins. A VU
meter, for instance, could be useful for all the documents you could
be working on.

The second option allows you to specify what to do with the effect
tail. The tail of the effect is the sound produced by the Audio Unit
after it has finished processing the selection. Instead of discarding
it, it is now possible to insert it in the document, or merge it with
the rest of the document.

From the release notes:

New Features

• Added the ability to move the cursor to the next transient.
• Saving OGG/Vorbis files (only reading was available).
• Reading WMA files.
• Added the ability to disable the automatic scrolling when playing.
• Added the insert silence effect.

Fixes and Improvements

• Improved the audio units management.
• When loading a split multichannel file, the document name was Untitled.
• The audio units GUI would not reflect the changes when a preset was loaded, on Leopard.
• TwistedWave would fail reading files that were several GB in size.

Transient detection

Among the new features, there is the ability for TwistedWave to detect
the transients in the document. Transients can be single shots from a
drum in a percussion loop, for instance. In the capture below, the
individual shots are clearly visible. It is often necessary to select
one of them to cut and paste it, or to apply an effect to a given
shot. However doing it accurately requires quite some dexterity.

TwistedWave is now able to detect these individual shots
automatically. Just press the Tab key, and the cursor moves to the
next transient. Shift-Tab, and the area between the cursor and the
next transient is selected. This is how the shot in the figure above
could be selected.

TwistedWave was updated to version 1.2.1. You can download it from the link available on our home page. It consists mainly of bug fixes, described in detail in the release notes.

From the release notes:

New Features

• Ready for Leopard!
• Reading/Writing FLAC files.
• Reading OGG/Vorbis files.
• Saving CAF files.
• It is possible to choose the sample size, bit rate and codec when saving a file.
• Added the cursor position and (optional) selection length in the toolbar.
• Added two dialogs for editing the cursor position and selection.
• Added the ability to reorder the channels.
• The file duration is displayed in the status bar.
• Added support for splitted multichannel files.
• Double click to select a whole channel, triple click to select all.
• Added the ‘Invert Polarity’ effect.
• It is possible to change the timeline font size.

Fixes and Improvements

• Recording would crash if the sound file and input device didn’t have the same number of channels.
• Previewing the “Change Speed” effect could crash.
• The check for updates should pass through proxies.
• The help buttons would not always open the documentation at the right page.
• Shift-clicking will select everything between the cursor and the mouse pointer.
• Improved the way TwistedWave follows the wave when recording.

Here’s a few comments on the main new features:

Cursor Position and Selection in the Toolbar

The Toolbar can now show the current cursor position, and the length
of the selection. Only the cursor position is included in the default
Toolbar. You can add the selection length by right-clicking the
toolbar, and selecting “Customize Toolbar…”.

If you had already used TwistedWave 1.0 or 1.1, the old toolbar was
saved in your preferences, and the cursor position will not show up.
You can customize the toolbar, and select the default toolbar.

Clicking on any of these two new items opens a dialog that allows you
to enter a precise position for the cursor, or the start and end
positions for the current selection.

Cursor position editor

The cursor position editor allows you to enter a numerical value for
the time you want to move the cursor to. This dialog allows a number
of formats for specifying the time, such as 10s for 10 seconds, or
1m25 for 1 minute and 25 seconds.

Selection editor

Exactly as with the cursor position editor, the selection editor
allows you to enter the precise duration of the selection, or specify
the start or end time.

An interesting feature of this dialog is the list of checkboxes on the
right hand side. They allow you to have a selection active only for a
selected number of channels. This can be useful if you want to have an
effect apply only on a subset of the channels. Some Audio Units, for
instance, are only able to work on stereo documents. You can now
easily select two channels, and apply the effect on these.

Reordering channels

In the Edit menu, you will now find this useful tool that allows you
to reorder the channels in a document.

With this tool, you can:

• Reorder the channels by drag and dropping them.
• Remove selected channels by pressing the delete key.
• Add channels by duplicating already existing ones.

Splitted multichannel files

Many audio file formats support more than two channels. These files
are already pretty well handled by TwistedWave.

Some applications, however, produce multichannel samples as a group of
mono files, one for each channel. These files are identified by a
.L/.R/.C/.LFE/.Ls/.Rs in the file name to indicate which channel they
represent.

When opening one of these files, TwistedWave automatically recognizes
that it is in fact a multichannel document, and opens all the other
similarly named files, one per channel.

Maybe the files you need to load don’t use the naming convention
described above. In that case, you can still manually select all the
files you want to open from the open panel, and check the option to
merge the channels from multiple files. If the channels don’t come up
in the right order, you can reorder them with the tool described just
above.