Look, this may be rare praise indeed, but I don;t think there is a better app out there for editing audio at this price point. Rogue Amoeba sets the bar for attention to detail IMHO. I'm not a fanboy - just a user with real world needs.

I had difficulty learning the first version of this app but eventually mastered it and liked it very much. As such I decided I didn't need to update to version 2 and skipped it. However, today I absentmindedly let MacUpdate Desktop download and overwrite the V 1.6.1 file I had. I usually hold onto downrev versions but could not find this one. Harummph.

But before I started digging around for an old file which I surely could have acquired via bit torrent, etc., or probably from the developer if i had asked, I decided to play with the new version of Fission. It turns out that it is so good I decided to enthusiastically keep it. It is really a step up from the previous version. I find it easier to work with because the modes always confused me. Also, the new FLAC support simplifies working with those files, and the new batch support is really welcome too.

Excellent little editor for quickly doing lossless trims, joins and fades. I've been using it for years to tidy up ALAC recordings made in Audio Hijack and on my iOS devices.

It's good to see that version 2 supports some extra formats for exporting - though True VBR AAC, which is my usual destination format, does not seem to be available yet, unfortunately. For that I use XLD.

I don't need (or want) to work with MP3 files very often, but occasionally I need to make a minor tweak or two in MP3 tracks (dozens and sometimes hundreds) for a specific purpose: playback from an SD card or a USB thumb drive on a Bosch PowerBox. The PowerBox will only play MP3 or WAV files from SD cards or thumb drives, so I go with MP3. However, for whatever reason, you need at least one second of silence at the beginning of these tracks, or the PowerBox truncates a small amount of audio from the beginning of each. It's just a PowerBox quirk. More often than not, music files have less than one second of silence at the beginning, and sometimes almost none. So, I need to go through these files and insert silence as necessary. In the past, I would do this in Peak because it was quick and easy, but now under Lion+, Peak has a problem with MP3 files (for me at least). It insists on saving the files at low quality 128kbps, no matter what the bit rate was originally, and no matter what you set it for. And now, with the demise of BIAS, this problem will never be fixed. So, recently I decided to give Fission a spin for this task. It can do the job, but it could be much easier and faster with a few little fixes in the software. In fact, on top of some crashers I've encountered in Fission 2.0.0, this version makes this kind of task a little harder and slower than before. Let's say you have 50 tracks that need a half second of silence added to the beginning. You have a menu item to "Insert Silence," and you type the amount to insert. But that's the problem, it's only a menu choice with no keyboard command, so you are mousing/trackpadding up to the menu over and over and over. "Insert Silence" needs a keyboard command! Moving on, you insert the silence only to find it's inserted with one or two splits (depending on the playhead position). In other words, you haven't inserted the silence, you've created a separate track of silence, so the split(s) need to be removed. Here again, this is done from a menu item which has no keyboard command. Aarrgghh, more mousing to the menu bar to remove the splits that really shouldn't appear in the first place. Keyboard command please! IMO, rather than adding such splits by default, they should NOT be added by default. If the user wants to create a split, let them do so with a button or menu item (with corresponding keyboard command), but please nix the automatic splits when inserting silence. In Fission pre-2.0.0, I could somewhat work around this hassle by inserting the half second of silence, copying it, and pasting it as I moved on to other files (if you moved the playhead slightly into the beginning silence of a file, then pasted more silence, it was nicely inserted without splits). But now in v2.0.0, splits appear around pastes regardless of playhead position, so my workaround is no longer effective at preventing them, thus an extra step of going to the menu to clear them out, over and over again.

If I lost you there (i.e., you got sick of reading it), just sit down with about 400 MP3 files and use Fission 2.0.0 for the would-be simple task of adding a bit of silence to the beginning of each file, and you'll quickly see what I mean. ;-) I know other software is out there, and I don't mean to hammer on Fission, because I want to see it survive and improve. I like the dev's software, and they know what to do. The expensive, expansive (and probably dead) BIAS Peak, for example, now fails big-time for simple audio recording with Lion+. For me, it's really become unusable for recording, and Audio Hijack Pro shines in the face of it.

One last thing about Fission 2.0.0. I personally could do without the startup window. True, it gives you quick access to "Open" and "Batch Convert," and it offers a dropbox for files. However, if you'd rather hide this window and use command-O for choosing what to open, well, you can't (not me at least). This window keeps coming back to haunt me (not just on a relaunch, but even after closing the last open file). Besides, clicking "Open" in this window often causes a crash for me, but then, so does command-O. Something seems to need attention there, but nobody else has mentioned this. If this problem with "Open" hasn't bothered anyone else, maybe it's something about my own system that's conflicting, though I can't figure out what it might be, and it coincidentally appeared with Fission 2.0.0.

Looks nice but this this supports VST plugins?

fission causes MDS process to use extremely high cpu (145%) when opening any file.
the only way to stop the high cpu is to close fission.

i have tried aiff and mp3 files with 1.52, 1.61 and 1.62.
i have an C2D 2.4Ghz processor with 4GB ram.

it would be nice if they would fix this problem.