Categories Menu

Posted by on Dec 5, 2012 | 76 comments

Triumph – Review (and giveaway!)

[The kind folks at Audiofile Engineering have put together a giveaway of apps - including Triumph. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find out how you can be one of the three lucky people to win!]

OS X has suffered from the lack of a good and dedicated audio editor. There was a lot of hope pegged on the release of Sound Forge Pro Mac, but we all know how that went. There are a few alternatives though – Amadeus Pro ($59.99), TwistedWave ($79.90),  Adobe Audition ($349) and Triumph ($79.99).

Triumph, by Audiofile Engineering, is version 2.0 of Wave Editor. While it does retain majority of the functionality from Wave Editor, it has also been rewritten ground up to take full advantage of the latest features in OS X – Auto Save, gestural input and support for retina displays, to name a few.

Before I dig into the details, here are some of the new features:

  • AppleScript Support: AppleScript (Apple’s easy to learn scripting language) has been deeply integrated into Triumph. Most of tools, actions and processes are AppleScripts, which makes it easy to create custom templates and automate processes
  • Auto Save & Versions: Triumph supports Auto Save and Versions in 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Snow Leopard). I’m not a fan of these new features in OS X and thankfully they can be turned off from the Preference menu in Triumph
  • Effects Groups: Probably one of the most useful features – to save a chain of effects as a group
  • Effects Automation: Useful for expressive and detailed sound design
  • Hardware Output & Channel Mapping: Configurable channel mapping – both at the project and hardware level.
  • Redesigned Meters: Don’t we all need gorgeous looking oversampling meters?
  • Scrubbing: For intricate editing
  • Notification Center (for OS X 10.8 – Mountain Lion): I’m still a Lion user and haven’t been able to experience the new Notification Center. It allows “you to be unobtrusively notified when operations complete”

First Impressions:

Installing and registering Triumph was a breeze. The first thing that impressed me was how quickly it opened up – almost instantaneous. On creating a new project I was greeted with a gorgeous and well designed interface. It took a bit of clicking around and reading the user guide (which unfortunately isn’t as extensive as it should be) to get some understanding of what Triumph is capable of. I’ve used Wave Editor only once (about a year ago), so I was quite new to the workflow. If you are a Wave Editor user, you might find it easier to get started right away.

Read More

Posted by on Nov 29, 2012 | 1 comment

Matthew Foust, Audiofile Engineering

Audiofile Engineering recently unveiled Triumph, not just an update to Wave Editor (with lots of new features) but rebuilt ground up to take full advantage of the latest features in OS X. I’ve been giving it a test run and will be sharing my thoughts in the form of a review shortly. Stay tuned for it because it will also include a big Audiofile Engineering app giveaway (including Triumph)!

While I take Triumph on a test drive, I thought it would be great to interview Matthew Foust, co-founder and operations manager at Audiofile Engineering, to find out more about the innovation that drives company.

DS: Tell us about the background of Audiofile Engineering. How and when did it all begin?

MF: It was, for all intents and purposes, an accident. Ev (Olcott) and I had been playing music together in Minneapolis for a while. We decided to open a studio together around 2000 and did a lot of recording of bands and writing/sound design for Hollywood (mostly movie trailers and cartoons). Ev had been coding since grade school. I had been working in IT doing architecture and scalable systems. Obviously, we’re both eggheads and Apple lovers.

Long story longer, our DAW of choice was MOTU Digital Performer which was the first to make the leap to Mac OS X. We updated our main DAW to Mac OS X and realized that, although our DAW was Mac OS X-compatible, nothing else was. Ev had tons and tons of samples that we needed to process and we had been using an old app called Alchemy that withered away. Thus we developed, for our own purposes, Sample Manager. Well, the lightbulb went on that other people might be interested in this. The businessperson in me realized that a) the studio business was going to going start contracting in a serious way and b) there was a vacuum of audio tools designed and built for Mac OS X. Audiofile Engineering was born.

DS: You’ve got quite a roster of applications – both for OSX and iOS. All of them have gorgeous designs and great functionality built in. It seems like a lot of time and effort is spent not just replicating functionality but also reinventing the wheel?

MF: Exactly. Our goal is always to rethink the way humans can and should interact with audio and music-making software. I think FiRe is a great example of that. We could have easily published a dime-a-dozen voice recorder app when the iOS App Store launched, but it wouldn’t have been interesting. We worked on FiRe for over a year because we wanted to replace a hand-held field recorder. That said, it had to take advantage of what these amazing devices could do that a field recorder couldn’t. It also had to do what other audio apps at the time weren’t doing. That’s why the real-time waveform view and SoundCloud integration were so important and worth waiting for.

Read More