Ocenaudio free audio editor

[Alex_HS]

Quick tried on Hackintosh (Retail OS X 10.6.7). Crash after a few seconds after the opening I don't have time to even open the file.
PS: Renamed main folder with VST plugins. It works now. Need to find incompatible plugins.

Q: Can I play file to the end, when zoomed? It stops at the right edge of the window.

[loopdon]

will check, looks clean! Seems right up my alley

[Xenakios]

Crashes pretty much as soon as it shows the window (due to memory access violation error). Windows 7 64 bit.

The VST plugins are loaded in the ocenaudio startup. Some of these plugins may interact with ocenaudio in a way that could make it crash. Perhaps you could try to move some of your plugins to another folder and give ocenaudio another try? Or maybe, in the next release (with VST plugin configuration), you could try to disable them altogether. In this case, we could try to pinpoint the offending plugin and see what is causing this crash.

Ok, thanks for the suggestion but I'll skip further testing until the program doesn't attempt loading VST plugins by default. It's not reasonable to expect users to rename/move their VST plugin folders to get the program to run. The app should rather ask the user if he wants VST plugins enabled, and/or there should the ability to set up VST plugin folders (note the multiple ) in preferences.

Anyway, this could be an interesting app, so I'll wait with interest further releases.

[ocenaudio]

Q: Can I play file to the end, when zoomed? It stops at the right edge of the window.

No, in this version the way to play the file until the end is without zoom. We're trying to think some way to do this.

[Ozpeter]

The devil - or in this case, the angel - is in the detail. There are some very nice features in this and I hope the writers have patented them! In particular the multi-selection and region stuff which took me a while to puzzle out, but this is what you can do -

Make a selection while dragging on the waveform as normal.

Hold down ctrl while dragging and you make another selection without losing the first, or others.

Play, and the selections will be played as if other material was omitted.

Drag the little handles at the bottom of the selection(s) to adjust.

File > New From > Selection - creates a new file from the selections, so all else is omitted.

Edit > Invert Selection will do just that, so you can then do the preceding step cutting out everything selected.

Now, one wrong click and your selections can disappear (if you forgot to press ctrl). So here's the really neat bit.

View > Custom Tracks > Regions and Cues

Edit > Create Region (from the current selection(s)

Now in the Regions and Cues track at the bottom, you see blobs representing the region(s).

Double click on the blobs to name them if you want. You can enter quite a bit of text - what shows depends on zoom level of the waveform.

Alt/click on a blob to activate that region as a selection.

Ctrl/alt/click on a blob to add that region to existing selections.

You can adjust regions by dragging blob edges.

Stuff not found that I would have expected -

1 - A means to save the regions like a project file. Of course you can save the file but the regions are not there next time you open it.

2 - A means to activate all regions at once as selections. If you were doing a lot of edits and wanted to activate the regions at the end, you'd have a lot of clicking to do.

3 - A means to stop the creation of a selection from destroying other selections, if you forgot to press ctrl. In other words, "lock selections" or similar. And unlock of course.

All in all, a very promising tool and I look forward to future development. Thanks!

[Ozpeter]

Just discovered by accident that if you have more than one file open (eg, you open the file you are working from, then you do file > new (to create an empty new one), then you create a few selections in the original file, you can open up the left panel (with the button beside the record button) and ctrl/drag the selection(s) into the empty file. Further ctrl/dragging of other selections will be added to the end of the new file. So you can quickly build up a new file from bits of the original in whatever order you want, nondestructively. Do this as you go, or create regions and drag them in to the new file later.

Neat stuff.

[Ozpeter]

More....

Actually you can just drag selections from the waveform pane into the files pane at the left and if you drop in empty space, a new file is created and named. You can then drag and drop between these files themselves, or highlight several, right click and choose "merge" (or other things eg compare). Right click on a single file in the files pane, and there are options to extract channels, swap channels, split to mono files etc etc. and rename.

All of this provides an editing workflow not like anything else I have personally seen.

I should write the manual...

[Ozpeter]

and... you can drop a url into the files pane, press record, and it records the audio from the url (eg an internet radio station). More neatness!

[Edit - not actually true, ignore that - I was actually just recording the soundcard in fact. Not sure what the purpose of opening a url as a file is.]

[xNiMiNx]

In particular the multi-selection and region stuff

This feature is what got me to check it out, but as a lot of others have reported, crashes plagued me, so i didnt get to spend too much time playing with multi select.

Hopefully this app will grow, less bugs, more features. I think the possibilities of multi select and multitrack, would be sweet, and open up new avenues of workflow.

Is the callhome to check for updates? If so, please add an options page, to disable this. I, in the minority(?), like to decide when to update things, at my own time of choosing, as to not break things im currently working on.

Edit: Any chance to get left and right channels to work seperately with the multi selection tool? IE, select multiple regions in left, select multiple regions in right, at different areas.

[hebb]

looks neat - hopefully it makes it out of beta.

[~Pd~]

What an awesome app! Works great on Snow Leopard, and much thanks to Ozpeter for dropping science on the use of regions and the file pane.

[Ozpeter]

as a lot of others have reported, crashes plagued me

I don't think I've had a single crash with it so far - clearly there are major issues for some in relation to VST effects being uncontrollably scanned, and they need to address this (and it seems this is in hand) but apart from that, as beta software goes, it seems pretty stable (here at least).

[anzoid]

I don't think I've had a single crash with it so far - clearly there are major issues for some in relation to VST effects being uncontrollably scanned, and they need to address this (and it seems this is in hand) but apart from that, as beta software goes, it seems pretty stable (here at least).

Likewise here, no crashes as yet when editing a number of reasonably large .wav files. This editor could conceivably replace Audacity for me

[nay-seven]

@ Ozpeter

thanks a lot to discover this function, this made this little program definitively interesting !

[Sascha Franck]

To be honest, I wouldn't know what to use this for. What exactly does it do that Audacity can't?
If you added, say, a proper loop point finder and editor, I'd probably use it sometimes. But as is, it will just go out of my applications folder.
Sorry.

- Sascha