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.

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).

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.

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.

This is the place where you can find news related to TwistedWave, including updates, major bug fixes, special offers or any other kind of announces.

I will also occasionally post articles that may help you use TwistedWave more efficiently, describing how to take advantage of the more unusual features.

Stay tuned.