Packed With Features
The list of features that Peak has crammed into this software, both visible and “under the hood,” is pretty impressive. Simple cut-and-paste edits can optionally use a blending envelope that can be of any length, with user-definable fade ins and outs. Two modes of scrubbing are available: the usual tape-style, where the sound slows down and speeds up, and “dynamic” scrubbing, which is more like frame-based editing. As you move the cursor, little pieces of audio (you define the length) are looped, so you can pinpoint and lock onto a particular audio event very precisely. It’s not pretty to listen to, but it works really well.

Amplitude Fit is a feature borrowed from Alchemy: You draw an amplitude envelope, and no matter what the envelope of the original file looks like, it changes to match your new envelope—sort of like a supercrunching limiter with automation. The Duration Change function allows you to specify the new length in tempos and beats. Modulate combines two files like an old-fashioned ring modulator, and Convolve analyzes the spectral content of a sound you place on the clipboard and applies it to the current file, which serves to reinforce spectral elements that the two have in common.

Repair Clicks does an admirable job of finding and eliminating clicks, and gives you a comprehensive, if initially a little confusing, set of parameters to play with. The program displays a pair of large, fast bar-graph meters, whose sampling speed, peak-hold and clip-indicator times can be adjusted. And the program will now play back audio locked to SMPTE/MTC, with an adjustable re-sync parameter for dealing with timecode drift.

One of my favorite Peak functions, which dates back to early versions, is Threshold. This feature acts like a gate in that you can specify an attack and release threshold and gain setting, and a minimum duration time, but instead of processing the file, it inserts markers at points where the “gate” would open and close, thereby intelligently breaking the file up into regions. As you adjust the parameters in one window, you can see the markers being created in the main window, so getting the settings right is quick and intuitive. Once you’ve got those markers in place, you can export each region into its own file.

Peak’s support of MIDI samplers has become much more stable. Formerly, complex SMDI networks could confuse the program, and if you didn’t specify your source files and targets in the sampler absolutely correctly and consistently, the program wouldn’t help you out, and in fact would often crash. The new routines make it much easier to get those numbers right, and the program is far more forgiving of both human and electronic error. Code for dealing with specific Akai, E-mu, Ensoniq, Peavey, Kurzweil, Roland and Yamaha SMDI-compatible samplers is now included, and my tests with a Kurzweil K2000 and a K2500 went perfectly.

Loop functions have improved as well: The task of finding loop points is helped greatly thanks to, along with standard Loop Tuner and crossfade loop functions, something called Loop Surfer, which creates a loop according to user-specified beat lengths and tempo. And if you don’t know the tempo of the file you’re looking at, a Guess Tempo function analyzes the peaks and troughs in the waveform and figures out—reasonably successfully—what the tempo is.

Another of Peak’s most attractive capabilities is its Batch Processing feature. You can set up any number of input, processing and output options, save them as a “script,” and then, simply by dropping files from the desktop onto Peak’s icon (or an alias), all the files will be processed and dumped to the folder of your choice, while you go and have lunch. The interface is not quite as clear as it could be, but once you figure it out, you can do some very slick moves like import a dual-mono file, normalize it, knock out everything above 10 kHz, and save it as a RealAudio 5.0 stereo file (with the proper file extension) on a different disk.

Along with all the new features, the user interface has undergone a radical change, with “Goo”-like controls in a Toolbar that stretches across the entire screen. The buttons are a little too small and their icons a little ambiguous for my taste, but a welcome touch is that when you move the mouse over a button, a text window at the bottom tells you what the tool does. You can customize the Toolbar, or if you find it really annoying, you can simply hide the whole thing and use the menus and keyboard shortcuts. You can customize your own keyboard shortcuts and make a little “cue card” text file you can print out (there’s a Filemaker template for this included).

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Reprinted with permission from Mix Magazine, July, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved