Fission Reviews

Nice app, but Audacity is free ......

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.

Not a bad audio editor but very unstable at times. When cutting/pasting it hard crashes frequently.

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.

If this could do batch normalization I would buy it!

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.

Looks nice but this this supports VST plugins?

I would love to switch to this, but it has no manual click/pop repair. :(