CompuServe Messages

John – I'm rather new to video, but have been doing audio for the past 20 years or so. I just discovered a tool that has made my life a whole lot easier. It's called Software Audio Workshop (SAW) from Innovative Quality Software. This is a digital audio editor that works with standard sound cards in a PC compatible. It works best with the Turtle Beach cards or the CardD+ from DAL. You can lurk over on their forum by using the GO SAWSUPPORT command and selecting Innovative Quality Software. I'm using SAW with a Turtle Beach Multisound and a zippy IDE drive. With a fast drive, you can get up to 4 stereo tracks mixing down in real time. (i.e., NO AUDIO "RENDERING") I can do 3 stereo tracks with my IDE drive. You have to understand this is with NO OTHER HARDWARE OTHER THAN THE STEREO SOUNDCARD. It's truly an amazing hack. It's faster than all heck because it's written in 32bit assembly language for Windows. I just did about a 1/2 hour of voice overs on a project that I had recorded to a PCM encoder (sort of a DAT forerunner). There were lots of bad takes, but it didn't matter because I spooled the lot onto my hard drive via SAW and just pasted the whole thing together. I then spooled it back onto the audio tracks on a video tape – perfectly. I don't work for the company, I'm just a wild enthusist. Prior to this I had been editing audio for my computer multi-media projects using Wave for Windows (from Turtle Beach), and I could have given my clients so much more, had I had this program. You can download a fully functional (except for 'save', I think) demo from the SAW forum. This is just as good as the Fast DP/R (for audio) if you can't afford to go DP/R yet. Check it out. db.out