bitflipper
I'm perfectly happy with AA3, which does everything I can imagine ever needing from an audio editor. Yes, it's old, but it's not like it'll just stop working anytime soon. 

You're right - maybe I should just stop over-thinking things and enjoy Audition 3. I does do everything I need - I just worry about when it will stop working ;-)
 

I did just try invoking audacity (from a DOS command line, not from SONAR) with a wave file pathname as an argument, and it worked (it's the only command line argument Audacity supports). That, AFAIK, is the only prerequisite for compatibility with SONAR.

It's not happy when you run it from SONAR though - it still wants to save the file as an audacity session by default - when it needs to be a wav file (the SONAR wav file)
 
 
 

Sixfinger
So what is it you would do in an audio editor that you couldn't do in Sonar, or prefer to do in an editor?
 

I like to call it from within SONAR to mess around with clips.
 
Also - for finished songs - I use it to trim, run through Ozone 5 for "mastering", and convert to 16 bit for burning to CD. It's just easier with a WAV editor. (but not worth >£200) ;-)

I use Audacity, but as a stand-alone editor, not integrated into Sonar.
 
Most tasks I find Sonar handles pretty well, for anything more in depth I'll use either Audacity or (my favourite) TWE, which still runs on modern systems incredibly :-)

I don't have the audacity ... .

(I guess a career in comedy was never on the horizon.)

jbraner

Sixfinger
So what is it you would do in an audio editor that you couldn't do in Sonar, or prefer to do in an editor?
 

I like to call it from within SONAR to mess around with clips.
 
Also - for finished songs - I use it to trim, run through Ozone 5 for "mastering", and convert to 16 bit for burning to CD. It's just easier with a WAV editor. (but not worth >£200) ;-)
 
For finished songs, you can just export a wave file in 24 bit and process with Audacity for trimming and 16-bit conversion. I use Audacity for all kinds of things, including just simple stereo recording...e.g. converting LPs. Similarly, you can export clips to wave (although that is a bigger hassle to go out and in). I can't imagine what i would do with a clip that I can't do in SONAR...particularly now with Melodyne Editor so neatly integrated.

Audacity (latest version) backs the file up and then works off that backup file. I think there is an option to turn this off so it works directly on the file.

CakeAlexS
Audacity (latest version) backs the file up and then works off that backup file. I think there is an option to turn this off so it works directly on the file.

Hi Alex,
 
Yeah - you can turn that off. The main problem is when you want to "save" the wav file (which is really a SONAR clip- it's called "tool copy of....") - Audacity wants to save "tool copy of...." in it's own format. You can "export" to a WAV file - but where do you save "tool copy of..."?
 
It's too complicated - other editors "just do it...."

Other issue is Audacity doesn't do ASIO unless you recompile it for some reason... which is a pain...

There are very few useful differences between AA3 and the latest version unless you do video production as well.  The only minor annoyance would be lack of 64 bit, but that same problem plagues Soundforge too.  Fairly minor issue if you don't find yourself missing any 64-bit plugins that for some reason you don't have available as 32-bit too.

Point taken dub. It's just my paranoia about AA3 getting a little long in the tooth - and way beyond any kind of support. I'm waiting for some Windows 8 update to make it stop working ;-)