Four years ago, a small Northern California company called Berkley Integrated Audio Software (named for its president, not the city), or BIAS, came out with what might be called the first modern audio-design and editing program for the Macintosh. It was a product that was sorely needed—Digidesign’s Sound Designer, by then 10 years old, was getting awfully long in the tooth, and the only comparable program, Donny Blank’s Alchemy, had dropped out of sight when the last of a series of publishers, Passport Designs, discontinued it not long before they themselves bit the dust.

Alchemy (while still in many respects a very cool program, with an honored place on my hard drive) is today long gone, but Sound Designer, despite regular reports of its impending demise, is still available. For some of us, particularly those using older Digidesign gear, Sound Designer remains useful for quick-and-dirty editing, file format changes within a small universe, and other such straightforward tasks, and I for one would not give it up quickly, either as a production tool or a teaching tool. (Its visual FFT displays still give me goose bumps.)

BIAS Peak’s waveform editing screen (click for larger image)

Peak started out by deliberately filling in the gaps left by Sound Designer. Whereas Digidesign’s product was entirely disk-based and performed most of its functions by literally chopping up disk files and moving them around, Peak, recognizing that people have a lot more disk space and RAM than they used to, uses a combination of disk access and RAM processing to manipulate sounds more quickly. It also does so nondestructively, even when it’s using hard disk space, thanks to its inclusion of a “scratch disk” feature. So it’s hard to make a mistake with Peak, since nothing gets carved in stone until you tell it to.

From the outset, Peak could do sample transfers from the Mac to hardware samplers, using both the impossibly slow MIDI Sample Dump Standard and the much more useful SMDI. Sound Designer (which, historians will recall, actually began life as a visual editor for the Emulator II) had dropped that particular ball, and so the new software immediately gained a loyal following within the sampler community.

Other features that Peak brought to the table were a far larger choice of file formats to save to and load from; unlimited Undos with an Edit History window, which lets you travel back in time through your editing operations and at any point change your mind and choose the road not taken; digital extraction from audio CDs (actually part of QuickTime, but made easy in Peak); batch processing; AppleScript support; and since it couldn’t easily use Digidesign plug-ins, support for Premiere plug-ins, a format that started out as a “kid brother” to Digidesign but now boasts some pretty impressive tools.

The Latest Revision, Version 2.1
Filling the gaps left by Sound Designer is no longer a priority—a greater challenge to the designers of Peak has been keeping pace with the formidable progress made on the PC side of the audio world by programs like Cool Edit Pro and Sound Forge. Which they’ve done: Peak remains a thoroughly modern program, with a terrific feature set.

In fact, it is now three programs: Peak LE ($99) is the entry-level “lite” edition, which can also be found bundled with a number of other programs like Adaptec’s Jam and Macromedia’s Director; the “professional” version is just known as Peak 2.1 ($499); and Peak 2.1-TDM Edition ($699), for Pro Tools owners who want to be able to keep using their collection of TDM plug-ins. Except for the LE version, Peak supports Digidesign’s DAE (the audio engine used by Pro Tools hardware) and AudioSuite plug-ins. So in an atmosphere in which other manufacturers, in an effort to save money, are withdrawing from Digidesign hardware support, it’s good to see BIAS working to keep all of its user base happy. All three versions support the now-healthy family of Premiere-compatible plug-ins, like Peak’s own SFX Machine, a very comprehensive suite of processors, a demo version of which is included. They also support Steinberg’s ASIO protocol.

Peak was always good at dealing with a large variety of file formats, and the new version extends that capability. It can import all the standard Mac formats, with up to 32-bit word lengths, and sampling rates of 96 kHz or even higher (if your hardware supports it), plus .WAV and various older compressed formats; the program developers at BIAS also say that it imports MPEG-3 files, but that was not mentioned in the manual, so that was not part of my test. However, like most other stand-alone audio editors, it does not support RealAudio. The output side however, is very flexible: You can save as RealAudio, with a full array of optimization choices for various bandwidths; MP3; Shockwave; Ensoniq PARIS format; JAM, for Adaptec’s CD-burning software; and even Sonic Solutions’ peculiar flavor of .AIFF, which can save a lot of time if you’re exchanging files with a Sonic system, since the latter’s conversion of standard .AIFF files is quite slow. A caveat, however: To do MPEG-3 and Shockwave, you have to download a plug-in from Macromedia’s Web site called SoundEdit 16 SWA Updates, and drop it into Peak’s plug-ins folder. The URL for the file is provided, but the procedure is pretty confusing, and the odd nomenclature doesn’t help.

The RealAudio export, in a quick test, worked well, and the results using a stereo 32 kbps bandwidth setting were completely respectable. On the other hand, the MPEG-3 conversion is disappointing: The procedure is ridiculously slow, at least on my 266 MHz G3, 17 minutes for a six-second stereo file, and the sound quality when set to 56 kbps is disappointing. After I completed my testing, BIAS’ staff told me that turning the disk cache way down would speed the encoding process considerably, without any decrease in sound quality. It would have been nice if this quirk were documented somewhere, and then I would have had a chance to try it.

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Reprinted with permission from Mix Magazine, July, 2000
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