Audio Cleaning Lab
$49.99, by Magix
For Windows 98 and above
Pentium II or higher
Sound card required
CD-R drive recommended
www.magix.com
This is the best software written for transferring one’s vinyl records, cassette tapes and even broadcast music onto CDs. Those CDs can be created to play in conventional music players or stored as MP3 files for playing on a computer.
Audio Cleaning Lab handles just about every conceivable issue, starting with a superb manual that gives a step-by-step description of the process. It also addresses such issues as what kind of wires and other equipment one needs to connect various music players to the PC’s sound card.
Once a music source is connected, the software uses wizard modules to handle tasks like eliminating hisses on cassette tapes, removing clicks from vinyl records and doing other sound cleanup on the computer.
A second wizard offers help in remastering tricks such as enhancing audio by adjusting the quality of the sound as well as its base volume. There are reverberation features to enhance recordings of human speech and a raft of special effects tools to tweak music, including sampling and cutting unwanted portions of a sound track.
Work gets done using a visual display of the music that one can cut and paste like a word processor. Or one can define just part of a track and then perform special tweaking.
Music is saved on the hard drive in the MP3 or WAV format.
Finally, the software makes it easy to output finished music to CDs using a computer’s CD-R burning functions.
If your CD-R works now, it will work like a song making custom discs with Magix’s standout software.
