Sound Studio 3: A Great Compromise for Podcasters

When I started podcasting with my Mac I used Audacity, a freeware program for recording the podcast. But when I upgraded to Tiger, Audacity and Tiger did not play well together and I was experiencing more then my share of crashes. I was not comfortable using Garageband because of the lack of post production capabilities. After spending a month of so trying very expensive programs, ($200.00-$500.00) I finally decided on spending the $199.00 and getting Sound Track Pro from Apple. I am happy with the recording and mixing and post production capabilities of STP, but I should have looked a little harder.

Sound Studio 3 would have been a great choice and at a lot less money then I paid for Sound Track Pro. Freeverse took over Sound Studio from Felt Tip software and is now selling the new version 3 for $79.95. Sound Studio 3 is as simple to understand and use as Audacity was and it has many of the advanced filters, effects and editing capabilities of the big boys. With Sound Studio 3 you can digitize tapes and vinyl records, record live performances, create your own mixes with crossfades, tweak the levels and EQ, apply digital effects, and save in all major file formats. But I think it’s a great choice for Mac Podcasters that want to present a solid sounding podcast with normalization, compression, equalization, and filters. I’ve used it for the past two podcasts I produced and have been very satisfied. Did it do everything I could do in STP? No, but I found that I really didn’t need to do everything I was doing in post production to put out a good sounding podcast.

I will list the features in Sound Studio 3 and you can decide if you’d like to give a try. If Audacity or Garageband is not doing it for you, Sound Studio 3 should be your next stop.

Recording:
* Multi-track support: layer stereo sounds and save in interleaved format
* Audio Unit plug-in effect support
* Saves in MPEG-4 AAC (advanced audio coding) m4a format
* Saves in MP3 when the LAME framework is installed
* Automator support (launch Automator to see the bundled actions)
* Added “New Mono Document” command for quickly creating a monophonic document
* 24-bit / 96 kHz sample quality, in stereo or mono
* Low latency monitoring, using Core Audio
* Automatic recording starting and stopping based on timers or audio levels (a.k.a. VOX)

Editing:
* Sample-accurate edits
* Markers (a.k.a. Cue Points) with text labels
* Time ruler with units for video and film
* Copy-and-paste editing
* Basic mixing edits
* AppleScript and Automator support

Effects:
* Supports Audio Units
* Dynamics: Compressor, Expander, and Noise Gate
* Equalization: Graphic EQ, Low Pass Filter, and High Pass Filter
* Delay: Chorus, Flanger, Echo, and Reverb
* Volume: Amplify, Fade In/Out/Special, and Normalize
* Repair: Interpolate, Silence, DC Offset, and Swap Channels
* Repair clicks and pops by interpolating samples or silencing them
* Tone, FM, and noise generators
* Pitch adjustment
* Backwards/Reverse Audio

File Formats:
* AIFF (.aif) and AIFF-C (.aifc) with compression including IMA 4:1
* AAC and MP3 (importing only).
* Sound Designer II
* Wave (.wav, PCM only)
* Tab-delimited text (export only)