FlexiMusic Wave Editor Review

As professional two-track sample editors become increasingly sophisticated, the bar has been raised substantially for entry and intermediate-level audio editing applications. Considering its price and functionality, FlexiMusic’s Wave Editor establishes a far-reaching appeal with its vast and intuitive collection of toolsets that easily eclipses many of its rivals.

At first launch, this comparatively light application, occupying less than 7 MB of hard drive space, presents users with a palette of varied color schemes that may be applied to the program’s interface, every element of which, from backgrounds to waveforms to gridlines, can be later customized within FlexiMusic’s Options dialog.

The interface, itself, is quite elegant, with a vast selection of toolbars that nearly eliminates any need to access the program’s menus, if so desired. Although the sheer number of icons within the available toolbars appears, at first glance, to be somewhat overwhelming, these tools can be hidden or exposed at will. Further, by simply dragging the mouse over any of the tool buttons, a brief description of its function appears within the interface’s status bar, and virtually any movement within the interface generates a small, non-intrusive, pop-up window with more detailed instructions, which can be disabled at any point. While such extensive guidance may not be necessary for professional users, it would likely serve as welcomed assistance to the novice.

The versatility of the application, while bearing in mind relative ease of use, is nothing short of remarkable. FlexiMusic incorporates the standard array of basic editing functions, but it goes a bit further by implementing more advanced features, such as the ability to paste modulated or mixed audio, as well as cross fades, within a single click. In addition to its effects, the application also offers separate Transform and Tools menus, which provide the means to manipulate files in a variety of ways, including waveform reversal, inversion, pitch and tempo adjustments, as well as CD track extraction and external recording.

Although FlexiMusic’s Generate menu allows users to insert silence and produce fairly straightforward noise or sine waves of user-defined frequency oscillation, the latter two perhaps being of fairly limited practical use, it also is home to one of the program’s most useful tools. The Draw function enables audiophiles to use the mouse to overwrite and physically redraw the waveform down to the sample level, indispensable for removing unwanted pops or clipping, or, conversely, actually adding audio to seamlessly fill in short dropouts.

The application’s Effects menu, it has to be said, is rather restricted in terms of the number of commands, which includes reverb, EQ, modulation, band-pass filters, and pitch shifting, among a handful of others, and the program does not support third-party DirectX or VST plug-ins. What is available, however, offers an incredible range of control and quality of a surprisingly high standard. Rather than a collection of visually oriented pot and fader effects menus, FlexiMusic employs more of a numerical approach to the majority of its variables. While this may not be the most aesthetically pleasing way to manipulate sound, it offers a greater and much more precise level of control that could not be achieved easily in any other manner. Moreover, many of the effects offer previews in case the results of any numerical entry are in question.

Despite claims within the documentation, which, it should be added, is beyond thorough, that FlexiMusic functions equally as an environment in which to create music beyond simply recording audio may be a little misleading. The accurate selection and playback of portions of waveforms within the editor can seem a little awkward at times, so there are certainly more effective solutions for multi-tracking. While it would be feasible, in theory, the strength of this application lies not in sequencing necessarily, but in its editing capabilities.

Beyond this, FlexiMusic operates flawlessly as a batch converter, supporting .wav, .au, .raw, .snd, .wma, and .mp3 file formats. Although it only supports 8- and 16-bit audio files, the program can accommodate sample rates of up to 200 kHz and file sizes of up to 2 GB.