FlexiMusic Wave Editor Review
Too little for a Pro and Too much for average Joe
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
- It's cheap.
- Recording quality is not bad.
- No native Mp3 support.
- No external plugin support. (VST/DX)
From an editors point of view this software rates badly. The interface is cluttered and non-intuitive even for me and I have used a large number of editors over the past 15 years (Cool-edit, Soundforge, wavelab etc). The lack of 24bit support and its inability to use mp3 files without installation and configuration of external software makes it too cumbersome for non-experienced users to use "off the shelf".
The quality reproduction of sound is well above average though. I recorded an acoustic guitar track and the quality was good. If you can get past some of the other issues this might be a usable tool at home to record short sounds for ring tones etc. The only point where this idea "dies" is with the realization that you cannot use VST based FX plugins at all.
It takes some time to get used to navigating the software and missing items like zoom buttons / sliders really makes life hard when having to zoom to do minor edits. When i accidentally applied a reverb across the entire 7 minute 48khz wav file the software seemed to freeze. The progress bar stopped moving and my one CPU core maxed out at 100%. After about 3 minutes the process was finally completed with a total lack of user feedback in those minutes. In this case, most users would have killed the windows program through taskmanager.
The help files are not too bad. Its easy to find what you are looking for (or where it would have been) but help is a little too sparse to be really usable.
There are a few opensource / free editors which will give you everything that is on offer in fleximusic. The only difference is that you can get freeware editors with mp3 (reading) support without needing external plugins. You can also add in VST / DX effects plugins to those, which is a must have in today's editors. The interface is too cluttered with buttons you will only use once in a while. Toolbars should be reserved for shortcuts to frequently used menu items. Just putting useless functions on the toolbar to fill it up does not add to functionality. Bottom line is that the software just does not have what even the small home studio users want and it is too complex for the average iPod owner to use. Having to install external software to get some (very important) features to work might be OK with freeware, but with paid software you want the experience "out of the box" to be smooth.