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MySoundStudio

An audio recording and editing package for the rest of us? Ian Waugh plays with MySoundStudio and makes the following noise...

Most direct-to-disk recording programs are aimed at the music professional or at least the serious home user. Here's a program packed with features that anyone can use.

Installation is easy. There's a quick start manual in Adobe Acrobat format to get you up and running. The main manual is in HTML format and very well produced but you can't search it and it's not half as convenient. However, if you know just a little about audio editing and recording you won't need to read much of either.

The program has six audio tracks that can be utilised as six mono or three stereo tracks, with large controls to adjust their volumes and pan positions. There's a mixer with the same controls plus solo and mute buttons, and you can group tracks in order to control several with one set of controls.

Record maker

You can record directly onto the tracks or import audio files onto them. Cut, copy and paste functions let you play fast and loose with audio segments although this isn't quite as flexible as some audio editors.

MySoundStudio has several processing functions including DC Offset which centres a recording on the zero line if it has been offset due to a faulty recording, and normalise which makes a section as loud as possible without distortion.

There are reverse and fade functions, too, and you can insert an FM sound, a tone consisting of a sine, triangle or square wave, silence or noise into a track. Coupled with some of the effects - coming up - there is limited scope for creating your own sounds and marlamising others.

Effects include a ten-band graphic EQ which can cut or boost specific frequencies, compression to make a sound tighter and punchier, delay, reverb and modulation. There are also pitch shift and time stretch functions, and a LoFi effect that degrades the sound quality. You never know when this might be useful!

There is also a noise reduction effect designed to reduce noise commonly found on vinyl recordings. Its success depends on the source material and the extent of the noise, but we'd hesitate to suggest it to tidy up old LPs, In fact, its performance was disappointing.

However, the effects in general work well although they aren't particularly outstanding. But then you get a lot and this is a budget program. However, it does not support effect plug-ins so you can't expand its repertoire.

A feature will appeal to many users is the ability to import an AVI file, edit the soundtrack and save the file again as a movie. This works very well making MySoundStudio ideal if you want a program to help you edit home movie soundtracks.

The program can also rip directly from audio CDs, again making it easy to assemble your own audio compilations. You can easily fade tracks into each other, add your own voice overs and apply effects. You will need a separate program to burn CDs, though.

The program can read and save high-quality MP3 files, too.

Summary

The serious musician and audiophile will probably pass over MySoundStudio, even at its budget price. However, if you don't need any heavyweight features and want an easy-to-use program for messing around with audio, CDs, MP3s and movie soundtracks, it will do the job very nicely. 

Ian Waugh

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