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).