here i am trying to clean up some audio files. i'm using sound studio and it's the first time where i'm really wondering how to go about doing something on the mac that i used to do so well on the pc. i love sound studio but i really miss what i could do with cool edit.

backstory: my mom dug out of the garage old home movies. i think they are 8mm. (i'm horrible with technical specifics!) she's borrowing a small viewer/editor that you hand crank. the viewer screen is quite small and awkward for multiple people to view the film at once. my mom wants to convert the old home movie films to vhs tape. there's a place my mom already knows of that can do this. they also will put home movies onto dvd, but my mom said it's quite expensive. as long as we can get the home movies on vhs, i think i can put them on dvd just fine. vhs-to-dvd is a project i need to learn and have been wanting to tackle but haven't had the time to get around to yet.

among the movies tapes was an audio tape. reel-to-reel. i played it and it's my mom talking when she was 26 years old, living in okinawa and dating my dad. you can hear my dad talk in the background, correcting her english and giving suggestions on what to talk about. it seems the destination of this tape was for my dad's relatives back in the states. perhaps this was her introductory reel letter.

it was quite interesting to listen to my mom at 26. her english is terrible! actually, the timbre of her voice, choice of words, and (mis)pronunciation reminds me a lot of a friend of mine. i don't want to say who in case they are offended, but i think it's really cute. learning english is tough, learning any language is tough. i commend anyone who can learn a foreign language enough to carry on a conversation with native speakers.

another point that i found interesting was the date of the recording. i'm glad my dad said what day it was when they taped it. it was recorded almost 3 years to the day before my birth. just 1 day off of 3 years. pretty spooky because in the tape my mom talks about her love for my dad and wanting to get married and go to california, though she is afraid of being around so many people. she even says she likes american food better than japanese food, except for blood, er bread!

anyway, what's bugging me is cleaning up the tape hiss. it was so easy in cool edit. i would just highlight a portion that is supposed to be silent in order to isolate the hiss. then i would run an analysis on it and clean up the rest of the file based on that analysis. it was just a few mouse clicks and i really didn't have to put much effort into it. it's not so easy with sound edit. i highlight a portion that has peaks and lows to get a good sample of how the filter will effect the quality. i use the noise gate filter and mess around with the parameters until i get something decent, but i feel like it's not even close to the miracle that cool edit performs.

i've looked into other audio programs for mac but the good ones are so expensive. i also haven't been able to figure out if they can do what i like about cool edit, that is, what i just described above. a friend did lend me a copy of peak but i really don't like it. the only thing i can figure it's good for so far is that it is able to open mp3 and aac (m4a), which is something i haven't been able to do in sound studio. [ok, i just tried. i CAN open these files in sound studio. it's just that i can't drag and drop the files into the sound studio icon in the dock. i must file->import with quicktime.] being able to open and edit such files is quite useful if you're picky about music you import into your computer from cds, like me. sometimes cd manufacturers really screw up the track order or even the track markers. i set things right. (for example, skinny puppy's "rabies" re-puppied edition.) or maybe the song was split across several tracks and that's cool to watch while the cd plays but not cool when you have your player set on shuffle. (for example, cafe tacuba's "reves/yosoy" which has "bicicleta" spread out at about 2 seconds on each track.) or maybe the album has several songs on 1 track and you want to split them up so that each song is a separate track so you know which song you're listening to. (for example, yagami toll and the blue sky's debut album.)

cool edit pro is now adobe audition. maybe there's hope that adobe will make a mac version of it. but i am a bit weary of adobe trying to handle anything other than what they do best: graphics/desktop publishing software.