Slice and Dice with Rogue Amoeba Fission

During a long flight recently, I had to clean up some audio I had recorded for a podcast. Too many "ums" and "ahs" for my taste, so a little surgery was required. I fired up Rogue Amoeba's Fission, and cut through 30 minutes of yak yak faster than bare feet running on hot sand.

That's what this Universal Binary (Mac Intel and PowerPCs) sound editor focuses on: cutting audio. Sounds simple, and you probably already have a tool to handle that. But with Fission, I can open a MP3 file, snip out an offending segment, then save the edited file without recompressing it. Hmmm.... that is really handy.

OK, real life situation here: Say that I have a podcast that's ready to go. It's been recorded, edited, includes wrappers, and is compressed down to MP3 or MP4. I'm ready to go when I hear a squeaky door opening in the background that I missed before. Do I want to go back to the master mix, edit, then recompress? Nope. I just want to get rid of the squeak and upload it. Fission lets me quickly remove the offending audio, save, and be done. Just like that.

Another handy scenario is adding a closing fade to an audio track for a QuickTime slideshow. Normally I have a few hoops to jump through to accomplish this. With Fission, I open the audio track, crop it to the time length I need (say 2:30), move the scrubber to the last 5 seconds of the track, and click "Fade Out." Now all I have to do is use the Save Audio command, and I have an edited file waiting for me on my desktop that didn't have to be recompressed, and is ready to add to my slideshow.

You can download Fission for free and try a fully functional demo version. If you like it, and I'm sure you will, you can buy it for $32. But, if you already own Audio Hijack Pro, you can get a coupon for Fission that saves you $14. That means you can buy a nifty audio editor for $18. Give it a try.

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