Reviewer, 2007-12-18 11:25:00

WaveMax 3 is audio editing tool. Recording, analysis and editing tools that include a range of effects on the one hand and spectrum analysis tool like FFT analysis.

Pros: The User interface is well arranged around the central area where the file being processed is displayed. First set of icons are for file manipulation. This is followed by a set of icons that initiate various effects. Effects include echo, amplification, noise reduction, reverb, chorus and flanger, as well as time stretching/pitch control combination. Series of undo/redo is really useful as it is always could to be able to go back to a known point when the effects applied do not sound right. Standard edit operations like cut, copy, paste and mixing are available. Noise reduction, equalizing of channels etc are part of the edit tools.

Often needed functionalities like CD ripping, recording from LP records or cassettes is made easier with this tool. CD ripping includes looking up of CDDB database. Tag editing is possible.

Text to speech function allows documents to be converted to synthetic speech so that one could listen to important documents while on the move. It’s possible to process multiple documents through the batch processing functionality. As could be any other set of editing steps that can be used on a set of recordings, for example in cleaning up stacks of old recordings that needs same processing.

WaveMax works as a wav/mp3 editor but supports a number of other file formats including wma, wav, mp3, mp2, vox, gsm, dsp, cda, aiff, au, raw etc.

Cons: The package is well designed and easy to use but looks a lot like the interface of the CyberPower Audio Editing Lab 12.01. There are differences but there are striking similarities too.

Overall: By itself I’d have possibly rated it at level 5 but because of the doubts expressed in the earlier section the rating cannot be more than 4 starts.