Alternates to Adobe Audition

November 12, 2008 12:52 PM

Looking for load-time solutions for audio editing files through a bottlenecked network structure.

Part of my job involves editing .wav files that are around 100-500mb. Unfortunately, due to some boneheaded decisions on how a colocation data backup center should work, ALL of our data is stored offsite, and our pipe through there is sluggish at best (a frustrated rant for another time).

We use CoolEdit Pro, which has a function to create a .pk file which serves as a cache/bookmark and allows us to open the files across the network in a matter of seconds instead of 20-30 mintues. CoolEdit has since been bought out and revamped as Adobe Audition, but our licenses don't cover upgrades to the new version. Meanwhile, CoolEdit is becoming increasingly unreliable on our machines because the software is 10 years old or so, and doesn't like XP much anymore.

Work doesn't want to pay for the Audition upgrade license (something like $1000 a pop), so is there any other basic audio editing software that uses a function similar to the .pk cache, and has decent volume leveling/normalizing/hard limiting functions?

posted by FatherDagon to computers & internet (3 comments total)

This seems to be a list of audio apps that create scratch/working files. It's not in much context though, so I don't know the extent to which each one caches a network file.

(If you're unsure, you can always download one of those time-limited trial thingies for most given apps.)
posted by shadytrees at 9:07 PM on November 12, 2008

Maybe you could make CoolEdit work again - it has been running well on my XP machines (SP3 and SP2)? I take it you have the latest upgrade before Audition. I don't suppose you can have a machine on your datacenter's side to run the audio software on, then VNC into that.
posted by yoHighness at 3:29 PM on November 13, 2008

We've been getting CEPro to work sporadically, mostly through thorough un-and-re-installs, but it's becoming more and more likely to just fail out entirely each day. We do have a station at the datacenter we remote into, so we can open the files in CE over there initially and create the .pk file we use to open the file again on our local end. The problem is that radmin doesn't play audio through the connection - we just get to see the desktop. So, our first draft edits have to be by sight, just scanning the waveform and recognizing what can get chopped in a first rough draft.

Shadytrees, thanks - I'll go through those progs and see if any of them will work in the capacity we need.
posted by FatherDagon at 3:52 PM on November 14, 2008