Few free audio editors come with the wide variety of functions, effects, filters, and tools that Power Sound Editor Free offers. With an intuitive recording feature and editing and enhancing utilities that you’ll only find in professional apps, this free tool allows you to rip CDs, extract audio from video files, remove noise and other artifacts, edit ID3 tags, and improve the overall quality of audio tracks in the most common audio formats.
Importing files into the app can be done in different ways. You can open any existing MP3, WAV, WMA, Ogg, or VOX audio file; rip the track from one of your CDs; extract the audio stream of one of the videos in your collection, and even download a YouTube video file and extract its soundtrack. The newly-recorded or any other selected file (you can only work with one file at a time) will be displayed as a waveform graph in the program’s interface, allowing you to select specific sections with millisecond precision. The multiple and varied editing tools are all neatly organized in various groups in a panel on the left-hand side. Here you’ll find functions for amplitude and compression, delay and echo, filters and equalizers, restoration tools, stereo imagery options, time and speech settings, inversion and reversion features, etc. To top this extensive selection off, you’ll find some useful extra utilities in the ribbon on the top side of the interface. There you have a text-to-speech function, a CD ripper, and a couple of other tools that are only available in the Deluxe version of the program. This superior version is only available as an in-app upgrade, and its features are not very clearly advertised in the program’s website. By purchasing this other license, you’ll be allowed to batch-convert audio files and merge them in a bigger file on top of everything else.
Most functions not only produce excellent pro-like results, but are also very easy to apply. A wide selection of presets, sliders, and preview options allow you to perform all kinds of edits in an intuitive and safe way. Importing audio from video files require more than one step (especially when downloading them from YouTube), and that is why the program offers you a convenient wizard to perform that operation. Its text-to-speech functionality is extremely easy to use, allowing you to select your favorite voice if you have more than one installed. After checking some of this audio enhancing tools and filters, I can only complain about the noise reduction feature. This extremely important tool has been simplified to the point of not even including customization settings of any kind. The program executes its noise reduction algorithm as soon as you select that option from the menu, not really knowing what kind of noise or artifact it is going to attack. You soon find out that the algorithm used has been designed to take away not only the background hiss or any pops and clicks, but also most of the audio dynamics of the audio file.
Despite the lack of flexibility of this and other minor features, Power Sound Editor Free is a tool that’s always worth having installed on your system. I won’t cost you anything and will help you rip your CDs, extract audio from your videos, make new audio recordings in the most straightforward way, and improve and enhance your audio files with tools that usually require purchasing a so-called professional audio editor.
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