TwistedWave 1.9 was just released. The detailed list of new features, fixes and improvements can be found in the release notes. It can be downloaded from the home page. The main new features are the support for VST plugins, the ability to import YouTube soundtracks, and support for .wmv, .flv, .ac3 and Audiobook .m4b files with chapters, and speech synthesis.

VST plugins

In addition to Audio Unit plugins, TwistedWave now supports VST (Steinberg’s Virtual Studio Technology) plugins. It is now possible to use with TwistedWave the effect plugins that are not available as Audio Units.

TwistedWave handles VST plugins exactly as Audio Units. They can be loaded in an effect stack, or used with the batch processing.

Import YouTube soundtracks

TwistedWave can now import the soundtrack directly from a YouTube movie. Select “File / Import from YouTube” from the main menu, and you have the option to provide the URL (the web page address) of a YouTube web page. TwistedWave will then start loading the movie’s soundtrack which you can then edit, and save as a file on your disk.

Speech synthesis

TwistedWave now integrates Apple’s speech synthesis. Enter your text, select a voice, and the corresponding synthesized speech will be inserted in the current sound file.

Support for Audiobook .m4b files

It is now possible to read and save audiobook files in the .m4b format. When an audiobook is read or saved, TwistedWave converts the chapters to markers and back. This makes it very easy to add, rename or move chapters in an audiobook or podcast.

When the file is loaded in iTunes or an iPod, the current chapter is displayed, and it is possible to skip to the next/previous chapter, making it easier to navigate inside a long audio file.

Improved batch processing

The batch processing offers new actions, such as:

• A cut action to remove or keep a specific part in the audio file.
• Two actions to apply fades in or out to the beginning or end of the audio file.
• An action to reorder the channels in a multichannel audio file.
• A few actions to work with markers, such as adding or removing markers, or splitting the file by the markers.
• An action that can copy a metadata field to another, or save the file name in a metadata field.

Support for trackpad swipe and pinch gestures

TwistedWave now understands trackpad gestures. You can use pinch to zoom, and swipe to quickly move to the beginning or the end of the file.

Additionally, scrolling with the trackpad or magic mouse has been improved and is much smoother.

Improved the insert silence effect

If a region is selected when applying the insert silence effect, instead of inserting the silence at the cursor position, the selected region is first deleted, and replaced by the silence.

This new behavior can be particularly useful in combination with the silence detector. When you have selected all the silences, inserting a silence will automatically make all the selected silences the same length.

Selecting a part of the waveform usually results in a contiguous selection, starting where you clicked the mouse up to the point where you released it.

A non-contiguous selection can be thought of as being composed of several simple selections, several regions are selected simultaneously. Here is how a non-contiguous selection can look like:

Although TwistedWave has always been able to handle non-contiguous selections, it has recently gained more visibility with the silence detector, because it uses a non-contiguous selection to mark the silences in an audio file.

Making a non-contiguous selection

When you click the waveform, the current selection is discarded, and you start making another selection. In order to make a non-contiguous, you can option-click, and the existing selection will remain, and you start adding to it.

Additionally, you can option-shift-click and drag the mouse to remove an area from the selection.

Exactly as with a simple selection, you can adjust a non-contiguous selection by clicking on its edges, or shift-clicking if you want to avoid accidentally deselecting everything by clicking just a bit too far.

What for?

What can this be used for?

The interesting point about non-contiguous selections is that all the effects that can be applied on a selection also work on non-contiguous selections, and if you want to apply an effect with the same settings on different parts of an audio file, instead of selecting a piece of audio, apply an effect, selecting another part, and applying again, you can select all the parts you want to process simultaneously, and apply the effect.

The nice part is that TwistedWave remembers the selection you applied the effect on. If you want to apply your effect with a different preset, hit undo, and the audio you were working on is automatically reselected.

Also, as indicated above, a non-contiguous selection is a very helpful tool to mark the silences automatically detected in the sound file.

Manually cutting a long file into many different parts, and saving them as individual files can be very tedious and quickly take a lot of time. In this article, I will demonstrate how easily this can be done with TwistedWave, thanks to the built-in silence detector.

Detecting the silences

When you want to split an audio file, the first task consists in detecting the silences, parts of the audio where there is no or little sound. Each time a silence appears in the file, this is a place where it should be cut. The silence detector is perfectly suited to this job. From the main menu, click Select / Detect Silences…, and here is what you get:

The simplicity of the interface reflects the fact that the task is fully automatic, and TwistedWave is able to detect the silences without any extra configuration. If you are working on a more complex sound file where the difference between the silences and the useful sounds is not obvious, you can see below how the expert mode of the silence detector can be used to fine-tune the way TwistedWave tells the silences from the rest of the file.

When the silence detector is opened, it first analyzes the audio, and previews the silences by selecting them, like this:

Seeing the image below may surprise you if you thought the selection always had to be contiguous. Well, it does not have to be, and this can be particularly useful in cases like this one. You can read more on non-contiguous selections.

When previewing the silences, you can start playing the audio, and TwistedWave will play all the selected silences. That way, you can make sure a useful sound was not selected by mistake.

After the audio was analyzed, from the pop-up button, you can select what to do with the silences in the audio file. When pressing the Apply button, one of several actions will be performed:

• Select Silences. This option will select the parts of the audio containing silence.
• Select Sounds. This is the opposite of the previous option, and only the areas not containing silence will be selected.
• Place Markers. Markers will be automatically placed at the beginning and end of each detected silence.
• Delete Silences. All the silences will be deleted.
• Delete Silences and Mark. All the silences will be deleted, and some markers will be placed where the cuts were made.

The option we are going to use is Delete Silences and Mark, which will give this when applied:

Naming the different parts

TwistedWave has automatically placed some markers at the places where the sound file should be cut. Now, it is convenient to give more explicit names to the markers, because they are going to be used to name the files.

Instead of double-clicking the markers one by one to rename them, the markers window provides a convenient way to rename all of them in one go. Double click the first one, and when you press return, the second is automatically selected to be renamed. You can also check the “Auto play” checkbox, and TwistedWave will automatically preview the audio starting at the marker you are renaming.

Splitting in individual files

Once you have placed the markers, and renamed them, the work is almost done. Select “Split by Markers” form the Markers menu, select the destination folder and file format, and TwistedWave does the rest:

The expert silence detector

On some occasions, there is no clear distinction between the silences and the rest of the file, and the simple detector will not correctly locate the silences in the sound file. In that case, you should switch to the expert mode, and you will have access to a number of settings that allow you to fine-tune the detection.

The expert silences detector looks like this:

A number of new parameters are available to control the silence detection. They are:

• Threshold. This parameter specifies the sound level in dB below which a sound is considered as silence. Note that when you open the silence detector, the sound file is analyzed, and this parameter is automatically set to a value that should be fine. You should only have to change this parameter in some cases where the distinction between sound and silence is less obvious.
• Minimum silence duration. This parameter specifies the minimum duration below which a silence is not considered. This can be useful when detecting silences from a file containing spoken text, and a small pause between two words should not be considered as silence.
• Minimum sound duration. This parameter specifies the minimum duration below which a sound is not considered as such, and will be treated as a silence. When a short noise is present during a silence, it can be desirable to still consider the silence as a whole, and ignore the sounds up to a given length.
• Left and right padding. When you want to cut the silences from a sound file, it may be necessary to keep around a fraction of a second of audio before and after each sound. If the sound fades out at the end, for instance, it may be necessary to keep it a bit longer even after it drops below the silence threshold.

For best results, here is how you should set the different parameters in the expert detector:

• First, set all the parameters to 0, except the threshold.
• If necessary, fine-tune the threshold so that all the silences are detected, even if some silence is found in the useful sounds.
• Increase the minimum silence duration just enough for the small silences in the middle of a sound to be ignored.
• If necessary, increase the minimum sound duration to ignore a short noise inside a silence.
• Increase the left and right padding values to keep a short silence before and after each useful sound.

Manually tweaking the silence detection

If the difference between the sounds and the silences is so small that the expert silence detector can’t make a correct detection, you still have the option to manually adjust the detection.

First, adjust the detection parameters as well as possible, and instead of cutting and marking the silences right now, select the option to “Select Silences”. Apply this, and close the silence detector.

Exactly as above, you should end up with a non-contiguous selection in the audio file:

You can adjust this selection by:

• Shift clicking its edges to adjust them.
• Option-click and drag the mouse to add a region to the selection in order to mark a silence that would not have been detected.
• Shift-Option-click and drag the mouse to remove a region from the selection to remove a silence that should be ignored, or to mark a sound that was ignored within a silence.

When this is done, make sure the option to Auto Mark Cuts is enabled, from the Markers menu, and press backspace, or Edit / Delete from the main menu. Then, export the files with “Split by Markers” and you are done.

A new update is now available, TwistedWave1.6.3.dmg.

It contains a few new features and a bug fix, as described below:

Change the pitch and speed

As a replacement for the old “Change Speed” effect, you now have the “Change Pitch and Speed” effect. In addition to changing the speed of your audio, you can now alter its pitch, independently of the speed.

Loop crossfade

A new kind of crossfade is now available. When playing a piece of audio in loop, if it was not prepared specifically to be looped, you can hear an annoying click when the play head moves from the end to the start of the loop.

With the new “Loop Crossfade” effect, TwistedWave will blend the end of the loop with its beginning. You just have to specify the duration of the fading between the two ends of the loop, and the result can be looped seamlessly.

Bug fix

Since TwistedWave 1.6.1, a crash could occur when opening the preferences window. This was now fixed. I am sorry for the inconvenience.

Bug fix

By mistake, I have introduced a small bug in TwistedWave 1.6.1.
Namely, some Audio Unit Plugins, or the “Change Speed” effect can
freeze TwistedWave when they are applied. Fortunately, I could fix it
as soon I as was aware of the problem. The correction is now available
in TwistedWave 1.6.2.

Custom Fade

In addition to a bug fix, the 1.6.2 update just released contains a
new feature. In response to a customer request, I have added the
ability to apply Custom Fades. This is like a “Fade In” or “Fade Out”,
except that you can specify the gain an the start and at the end of
the selection.

This feature is available from the main menu, in “Effects / Custom
Fade…”.

If there is something you would really like TwistedWave to do, your
suggestion is always welcome. I am usually quite responsive, and will
consider any suggestion.

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.

Along with the ‘New’, ‘Open’, ‘Save’ and other commands you usually find in the ‘File’ menu, you may not have noticed the ‘Duplicate Document’ item. How useful could that be? Don’t you get a duplicate document just by saving it with another name?

Working on an audio document often involves many steps, copy/pasting, applying several effects… If at some point, you are not entirely satisfied with the result, you can always undo, and try new settings for the effects.

Ideally, you would like to keep all your tests in order to compare them, and select the one that gives the best results. So far, the traditional way to achieve this has been to save the file with a different name for each version you wanted to keep.

When you duplicate a document, TwistedWave opens a new window with the same contents as the original one. This allows you to try new effects on the duplicated documents, keeping all your tests open, and eventually saving only the ones you like. Here are some of the benefits over the rename-and-save approach:

• Duplicating a document works instantly, independently of the file length.
• Duplicating documents is much more efficient when working on large files. No extra disk space or memory is used for the duplicated document.
• Each document keeps its entire history. You can still undo and redo your changes with both documents, independently of each other. This allows you to undo your latest changes from the duplicated document before trying new effects.
• Saving and reloading the file can reduce the sound quality. This is true when using a lossy codec, such as mp3 or aac. This can also be true when saving as an uncompressed wav or aiff file, because the bit depth may need to be reduced to 16 bits. The audio is coded on 32 bits when handled internally by TwistedWave, and duplicating the document preserves the full quality.
• You can duplicate documents even if they have not finished loading or applying an effect. (You can read more on how TwistedWave works in the background).

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.

Editing a sound file consists mainly in copy/pasting and applying effects. Although TwistedWave lets you copy and paste bits of the sound file around in no time, applying a sound effect affects every sample, and takes more and more time as the file gets longer.

Repeatedly applying effects on a long file becomes a very tedious process. This is especially true with an ordinary audio editor, where you have to wait for an effect to be completely applied before you can do anything else.

Because having to stop for a minute between each step can turn you crazy, TwistedWave does all the job of applying the effects in the background.

Applying an effect

When you instruct TwistedWave to apply an effect, it immediately starts processing it in the background. The waveform display shows that area where the effect is to be applied in a lighter color, indicating the parts of the wave currently being processed by the background task. As the task advances, this lighter area reduces, revealing the updated waveform.

An audio unit being processed

What makes this really useful is that even though TwistedWave has not finished applying the effect, you can still continue working on your document. With the only limitation that the waveform does not show the effect applied, you can still copy/paste parts of the file, play it back, or apply more effects. Here is how all this works:

• Applying a second effect. TwistedWave will keep a list of all the effects to be applied, and the background task will work on them one by one. The waveform will still appear in its lighter color until all the effects have been applied.
• Playing back. When you play back a part of the file that still needs some processing, TwistedWave uses the most up to date data it has, and applies the pending effects in real time.
• Copy/pasting. When you copy and paste a part of the file, TwistedWave will remember where it came from, and as the original data is being updated, this is automatically reflected at the place where it was pasted.

Loading a file

It is likely that you will first notice that TwistedWave works in the background as soon as you open a large file for the first time. Instead of showing you a progress bar while the file is being loaded, as is usual with a regular audio editor, TwistedWave opens right away with the document window ready to work. In fact, loading a file is handled internally exactly as any other effect, and can be done in the background.

TwistedWave keeps track of where the sound data comes from at any time, even after it has been copy/pasted multiple times. Imagine the following scenario: you are working on a document, and want to insert a part of a very long file in it. You open the long file, copy the relevant part, paste it, and close the file. Now, TwistedWave knows that the file was needed for the data you pasted, and will continue loading it in the background.

Saving

Now that you have applied many effects, and that your song sounds really good, it is the good time to save it. This is the only time where TwistedWave needs to have all the effects processed completely. When you save your document, a progress bar appears, indicating that TwistedWave still has some tasks to complete before it can save your file.

Completing current tasks

When all the effects are processed, TwistedWave then proceeds to saving the file.