You're the sonically creative type. In your mind's ear, Bill Clinton keeps crooning, "Mend it, don't end it," backed by an old Isley Brothers groove until it becomes a sentimental slow jam by the Chief Executive of Soul. Or maybe you hear your boss' relentless snort of a laugh looped backward through distortion and reverb so it sounds like a Trent Reznoresque dentist's drill. The ideas keep coming - all you need are the tools.
I feed my aural fetish with Cool Edit, a shareware audio editor for Windows. You can cut and paste sound clips in a sprawling sonic playground that comes complete with reverbs, delays, compressors, gates, flangers, and other serious sound toys. Beginners can stick with preset effects such as Light Fuzz, Empty Parking Garage, and High School Movie. But even creating more advanced hip hop and techno loops is a breeze. With these, you can speed up or slow down a sound without changing pitch, and you can alter the pitch without changing the speed. Rudimentary synthesis allows you to generate tones and random noise. Damn - you can practically alter your brain waves with this thing.
Cool Edit can handle 8-bit and 16-bit audio, from 6 KHz (telephone quality) to 48 KHz (DAT quality), and it supports a large array of file formats. Chances are it'll handle any sound file you've got.
The only real flaw to Cool Edit is the program's somewhat clunky interface - the icons are a bit amateurish, the dialog boxes rather dry and scientific in tone. Good thing the help files are wonderfully comprehensive.
The free demo version of Cool Edit has all the features of the registered version - except you can't access them simultaneously. After logging many blissful hours on this puppy, you'll gladly shell out the full registration fee.
Download Cool Edit now before Microsoft snaps it up, renames it Microsoft Sound, and charges you an arm and a leg.
Cool Edit for Windows: US$25 lite version, $50 basic registration, $100 preferred registration. Syntrillium Software Corporation: +1 (602) 941 4327, fax +1 (602) 941 8170, e-mail syntrill@aol.com. Demo version available at ftp:/oak.oakland.edu/win3/sound/cool151.zip.
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