I really appreciate simple apps which aren't full of bloatware.
Fission is such an app—perfect for editing and batch converting for the non-professional (and maybe pros too!?)
I'm sure there are audio editing apps with lots more features, but the simplicity of Fission is what wins my praise
nice! it's quicky and simple, but wish it had more features like adding filters and effects to repair and enhance the audio file. would be great to have audio meters too!
Great for quick lossless audio trimming and turning snippets into iPhone ringtones too. I bought this app when it first came out in 2006, bought the v.2 update five years ago(!) and am happy to see that they are still thinking of it, supporting 32-bit files.
It's an app I only need to use occasionally, but it's solid and does its job.
Fission is one of the best apps I have ever bought! It makes editing audio easy and painless. I don't write many reviews but I do want to help spread the word.
Giving a 4 start review to make up for my erroneous bug report below. I still think it's a risky UI choice that was made, (IMO editing keys should always act on text if text is highlighted and has focus), but I was wrong in stating that both Delete keys did the same thing.
I would give 5 starts if the documentation were improved (no mention made about being careful what Delete key you use when editing tags). Also, first few times I used the app, took forever to figure out how to remove a splt (not all, just a specific one...turns out you have to DOUBLE click on it, then press Delete, even though Delete is not on the right click pop menu).
Ability to edit the same tag across clips at once would be nice (like set the identical author or cover art for all clips).
In general I really like this product, but just discovered this nasty bug that was driving me nuts until I figured out what was happening.
Attempting to delete Tag info will delete the clip
how to reproduce:
1) edit a file into multiple clips, you can use the Split function to make create multiple clips (you must have multiple clips, bug doesn't manifest when there is only one clip)
2) select one of the clips so it is highlighted, make sure the Inspector window is open.
3) in the inspector window, select Tags
4) highlight the text in one of the tag fields, for example 'Title' field. There needs to be existing text in the field, if not, then type in some text first, then select some of the text.
5) Press the Delete or Backspace key; the expected behavior since the field has focus and the text is highlighted, the mouse cursor is still in the field, is that the highlighted text in the edit field will be deleted.
6) HOWEVER, pressing the Delete or Backspace at this point ends up deleting the clip you have highlighted.
7) I have found no way to delete text in a tag field without the Delete or Backspace key causing the clip to be deleted.
8) if you suggest, don't highlight the clip, that doesn't help, because you MUST highlight a clip in order for the Inspector window to allow you to edit the Tag info for that clip.
the work around is highlight the text you want to change, don't press Delete or Backspace but just start typing the text you want to replace it with.
Some could argue this is not a bug, but just a question of knowing how the app works, but from a UI interface perspective, the expected, dare I say 'correct' behavior, is that when you have text highlighted in a text field, and it has focus, and your text edit cursor is in that field, the Delete and Backspace key should act on the text in that field. If I click off that field so it no longer has focus, then fine. If nothing else, this is potentially a dangerous behavior, because it causes the deletion of audio data.
Besides that, still really like this app.
How does this stack up against TwistedWave? TW has been my goto app now for the last few years and has been amazing, but I've been curious about Fission. When I tried Fission about two years ago it just couldn't stack up against TW, but I'd love to hear an authoritative comparative review!
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.
While a tad expensive possibly it is indeed the only Mac app I've found that truly can convert Flac/Cue rips to lossless formats with maintained meta data in one go. Autoadding to the iTunes library is the only obvious thing missing.
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.
Great update, smart looking, easy to use. Not 5 stars because of the hard handling with precision to level parts on a track. A vumeter or scale could be welcome when leveling db; how much db we add? +3, +4? We currently can't know.
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.
I have been using this product for 6 years. Not only is it good at what it does but it has (until v2.0) been a pleasure to use too. That pleasure was partly due to its elegant UI, which with v2 has sadly become cruder and more childish. I would like to use some of the features in v2 but the price of having to work with that interface is a high one. I'll stick with v1.6.12 for now.
I'm using Fission 1.6.10 and every time I open a file it seems my MBP is going to take off with the fans running at full speed. Please fix CPU usage. No other audio editors I tried/used do the same. I'm sure there is a way to solve this problem.
I've consistently been impressed with the polish and quality of Rogue Amoeba products. A long time Audio Hijack Pro user, I recently bought Fission. Wow. The UI is beautiful but in a useful way and the functionality overall is fantastic.
I'm working on producing my first podcast, and after trying many, many apps (and having a data loss nightmare with GarageBand), I've settled on Fission for cleaning up a raw recording.
Yeah, if you look at the feature list, Fission doesn't measure up to Peak or Amadeus or whatever. That's not the point. Fission is *extremely* good at what it does. Plowing through a bunch of audio and deleting boring bits and ums is about three times as fast as Garageband. Fission is smart about keeping the selection sticky but not too sticky, and the way it handles regions of audio is smarter than the marker systems in other apps. It also has great keyboard shortcuts.
This is a fun app, and I've found it to be totally stable on Snow Leopard, which is a lot more than I can say for GarageBand. Absolutely worth the price. I have zero affiliation with Rogue Amoeba and have never bought one of their products before, I just love this app.
MP3 Trimmer is so much sharper, faster and with less overhead to use.
I own both but rarely even open Fission now. Fission has a rather obtuse and obscure interface slowed down by all the visuals. Pity, it showed early promise.
I used Fission to cut/edit about 1,000 albums and can say that it saved me so much time compared to other editors I had tried. Navigating, editing, splitting are all super slick in their implementation. I programmed my Kensington TurboMouse to instantly switch between tools to further improve the workflow efficiency. Saving files is also super fast and reliable. Crashes that rarely occurred in earlier versions are basically eliminated. Great quality software and well supported. Give it a try - you owe it to yourself.
I have been using Fission for several months. I often find myself needing to tweak voice-over tracks before dropping them into Flash and Fission has become my go-to app for this task. Fission makes it fast and easy to clip out audio segments, drop in replacement bits, and level it all out.
The interface is clean and easy to comprehend and I've never experienced a problem due to a bug. Fission has been a solid and reliable tool. I highly recommend it!
One word: impressive! We had a sizable, 12 hour audio book that the likes of Final Cut Studio 2, QuicktimePro, Audacity, et al just couldn't cope with. We discovered Fission and it breezed through the edits and exports with ease. The integrated ID3 tagging just added the icing when creating podcasts and audio books. Seriously powerful piece of kit and highly recommended, certainly for it's price point.
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.
First off, let me say that I actually do own and use this program.
Fission has a lot to like about it, but frankly I've been disappointed with the slow pace of bringing it up to a decent basic audio editor. It's main competition, the similarly-priced Amadeus Pro, blows it out of the water in terms of editing.
Fission's big selling point is that it can do lossless editing, but with editing left on such a very basic level, users quickly run into the wall.
Depending on the file format you're routinely having to edit, it's still a good value (when it's on sale via a bundle) -- but other programs like MP3 Trimmer and the aforementioned Amadeus do more for around the same price or less. I often use Fission to trim the "ends" off an audio file I recorded with Audio Hijack Pro, and I'm sure this is exactly what Rogue Amoeba had in mind for it. But a computer program working with digital audio files should be able to do more than what I could do with a razor blade back in the "tape" era.
I'm not looking for Fission to evolve into a full-blown audio editor, but a few key things like being able to join audio files, insert silence (now -- a year later -- finally addressed!), and cross-fade would bring this program up to the standard of a good utility tool for basic lossless audio editing, and justify the price.
Extremely unstable. Crashes constantly. When it does manage to survive a simple select and cut operation, it works.
It also maxes out my CPU when it's doing absolutely nothing, and the GUI is unbearably slow.
Would be nice if they could get it to stop crashing, and fix whatever is so horribly wrong with their UI (maybe they're doing custom drawing routines instead of using the standard hardware-accelerated 2D views provided by OS X).
Even then, it's still pretty bare-bones. As far as I can see, there is nothing that indicates the length of your selection. You cannot zoom all the way into to the sample level. You can split by silence, but oddly there is no function to trim silence at the beginning or end.
This simply needs an enormous amount of work, and considering it hasn't been updated in a year, it's looking like abandonware. My sympathy goes out to anyone who paid $32 for this.
For quick slicing, dicing, and mixing things around Fission is superb. Does lack some features, but is the fast "in and out" audio editor I have used. Well worth the money if you have audio to edit. Save your fancy audio editing tasks for another app, but use Fission for all those quick edits.
You can join files in Fission but unfortunately the method is clumsy and unpredictable.
You drag the additional files into the visualiser window. The only trouble is telling where it drops. It takes repeated attempts to get it to even drop at the end of a file and careful as you might be it still occassionally drop elsewhere, screwing up your file.
Definitely unusable for joining.
The excessive use of GUI also makes it sluggish and jerky.
It also doesn't let you edit common data in multiple divisions and doesn't have the sense to default to last entry or auto fill from the original file name.
Oddly the equaliser doesn't work on anything but the entire file, so you can't pick out a particularly flat bit, but requires you to select the entire file before it will work.
It also took me a while to work out what it was going to do when exporting. It seems to suggest that only one file will be exported and that using the original file name, which is a bit worrying if you think it is going to replace your original.
It feels still very rough around the edges.
I'm a Musician/Producer and use all the usual app's, Protools, Logic,Reason and PEAK($599) for 2 track editing. FISSION ($32) gives me something Peak doesn't!!
The ability to open an mp3, do some quick basic edits,save and move on !!
With Peak and every other app "I" have tried there are extra steps (more time) because in Peak etc the app has to 1st convert the mp3 into raw audio only then can you do your edits (of course Peak is an AMAZING Editor) then "Save As" an mp3 and wait for it to convert again !!!!!! FISSION IS FAST, SMOOTH, EASY TO USE AND AN ABSOLUTE GIVEAWAY AT $32 !!!
Keep up the good work guys
D.L. (NYC)
Looks like a useful tool, although it is still very basic. It's way overpriced for a specialized audio editor though. The only real strength it has compared to other editors is that it can do lossless editing of compressed audio files. In other words, it's an MP3/AAC trimmer/splitter/normalizer, and that's all it can do. Compared to Amadeus Pro -- a general audio editor that is far more capable and only costs $40 -- Fission should not cost any more than $20.
The normalization feature added in 1.1 is welcome (in fact, the program was borderline useless without this very basic feature), but it doesn't work on AAC files yet. Trying to normalize an AAC file gives the error: "An error in packet decoding occurred."
Even if this bug gets fixed, I still won't consider buying Fission until the price comes down.
Works well. Worth the cost if you get the Audio Hijack combo-discount.
I wish I'd seen MP3 Trimmer first, because not being able to join two files together with Fission is giving me some remorse.
Still very basic, but it's only a version 1.0.0. For now it won't dislodge Sound Studio (even version 2.2.4 from old Felt Tip) as my favorite simple editor, but I'm eagerly waiting for improvements.
What I'm missing: cut and paste to move parts around (there's only cut); merging of files into one; separate left and right channels edition, maximum zoom not large enough.
Good points: works with many formats; ID3 tags edition; plays (choppily) when manually moving a selection point, so you can have a sense of where you are.
This is a very practical and intuitive program. It does exactly what it says it does. No other audio editor works with AAC files, which makes it REALLY useful. It's the ideal companion to AudioHijack - and there's a discount for AudioHijack users too. Well done, Rogue Amoebia, again!
NIce little software, it does simple editing easily, with a clean OS X interface, something you don't have in other sounds editors. Would be very usefull to remove gaps in mp3 for example (for those pesky "hidden" songs). Or editing some sound files before importing them to imovie.
I've had a few bugs however. The "wave" section disapeared once and I saw my desktop through! The mouse pointer changed with icons of the tools with no apparent reasons, etc. And I only played with it for a few minutes. Looks more like a beta to me, but something I'll watch evolve.
I'd be more willing to buy it if it was 20$ instead of 32, and once these bugs are corrected of course.
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