For multitrack audio recording, many consider SAWPro the king. Its non-destructive editing capabilities are powerful, but beware! It's not an easy program to use.
SAWPro:
$950
SAWPlus32: $700
SAW32: $500
SAWPlus: $300
System Requirements:
Windows NT/98/95,
Pentium II-266 or higher
128 Mb RAM
XVGA video 1024X768 at 65000 colors
16-bit or higher Windows compatible sound card(s)
EIDE or ultra-wide SCSI hard drives
Innovative Quality Software
4680 S Eastern Ave Suite D
Las Vegas NV 89119
Software Audio Workshop (SAW) has been recording since recording wasn't cool - at least not on a PC. Back in the pre-Pentium days, serious audio recording on a PC was only a crazy dream. Serious recordists used a proprietary system like Pro Tools, with a Mac interface, and wondered why anyone would want to try to record on a PC. There were a few cards out there, and a lot of extravagant promises being made and broken, but most folks agreed that the Windows platform just didn't have what it took for audio.
April 2, 1999
However, humans being what they are, a few pioneering souls saw the future, and it was (sigh) Windows. The folks at Innovative Quality Software didn't sit around moaning - they built a product that became a milestone in recording history - the first professional multitrack audio package for the PC. Using innovative programming techniques and writing much of SAW in fast machine language, they bypassed much of the Windows system overhead that was holding back the audio scene.
That was over 4 years ago, and the rest is history. PC audio buffs have more tracks, more choices and better quality than we could have imagined, while Apple struggles to survive (sorry). As usually happens with innovators, others moved in and stole much of SAW's thunder. Nowadays Cubase VST and Cakewalk Pro Audio (both existed before SAW, but as MIDI-only sequencers) are probably better known, but SAW is the elder statesman of audio recording, and in many ways, it's still the best.
The latest version is called SAWPro, and features up to 64 tracks of audio recording in a non-destructive environment. Of course, the number of tracks you can work with depends on your sound card and the speed of your hard drive. Fortunately, SAW is designed to help you get as many glitch-free tracks as possible, and to be compatible with a wide variety of hardware.
Main Features
First, let's reel off some of SAWPro's major features (adapted from their Web site):
Simultaneous playback of
up to 32 mono or stereo
tracks and support for up to
12 stereo sound cards,
translating into a maximum
of 24 input/output channels.
Remote Transport panel
allowing control of SAWPro
from any other application.
Up to 99 multiple
levels of undo.
MultiTrack select mode
marking, allowing fast
grouping of multiple regions
for simultaneous editing
operations, including
complete Drag and Drop
non-destructive editing.
Programmable function key
views providing fast access
to multiple workspaces.
Software-emulated DSP
functions providing
parametric EQ, noise gate,
peak limiter, normalizer,
compressor, echo/delay
effects, vari-pitch/speed,
reverse audio, reverse
phase, and center channel
eliminate, patchable to each
track or sound card output
for real-time processing
during playback.
Powerful ability to adjust
volume, pans, mutes, and
solos during playback
(without additional
expensive hardware) and
ability to define fader slope
values for each mix change.
SMPTE sync and generate
capability with sub-frame
accuracy.
Loop scrubbing for finding
hard-to-see editpoints.
SAW was designed from the ground up to squeeze as much audio performance as possible out of the Windows platform. Much of SAW is written in assembly language, and proprietary coding replaces some of the clunkier bits of Windows overhead. Program speed and stability, as well as maximum audio performance, are the main priorities. System overhead is user-adjustable. That is, you can turn off processor-intensive things like real-time waveform displays, if your audio begins to bog down.
The Power of Non-Destructive Editing
Those who are used to destructive editing platforms like Cakewalk or Sound Forge (including yours truly) may take a while to get used to the very different concept of non-destructive editing. Once you master it, however, it's very powerful, and it is one of the centerpieces of SAWPro. Digidesign's Session software, reviewed earlier, also provides non-destructive editing.
What's so great about non-destructive editing? Two things. First, it's much faster. When you're directly editing a sound file, you have to wait for the computer to complete each edit. With large files, this can mean a whole cup of coffee between every edit command. But with a non-destructive system, you never edit the sound files themselves - just pointers to the sound files. Complex edits are made in milliseconds, more work gets done, and less coffee gets drunk, so you can get to sleep at night.
The second advantage to non-destructive editing is that it's the ultimate in flexibility. You don't have to keep alternate copies of a sound file, just alternate edit lists. Any of your edit operations can be reversed at any time. All the information you've recorded is still there, so if you change your mind about an edit, all you have to do is go back through the undo history to wherever you want to be. Working with sets of alternate takes, or alternate mixes, is a snap.
The drawback of course is that non-destructive editing is untidy and wasteful of disk space. Mistakes and extraneous junk doesn't get erased, it just isn't referred to by any Region. As the SAW manual glibly points out, disk space is pretty cheap these days, and when you finish a project, you presumably back it up to a CD-ROM or some such, and clear it from your hard drive anyway. The obsessively neat, alas, may never quite be able to get used to non-destructive editing.
This powerful editing environment takes some getting used to. In SAWPro, you have to learn to work with sound files, Regions, Multitrack Entries and Sequences. Regions are the basic building blocks of a piece. A Region is a user-defined section of a sound file. Once a Region is assigned to a track in the Multitrack View, it becomes a Multitrack Entry, of which any number can live on a single track. Several Regions one after the other on a single track form a Sequence. Confused yet? Read the online manual. Once you get it figured out, this arrangement offers incredible flexibility in putting together a piece. Building up a piece a track at a time is only one way to do things. This flexibility makes SAWPro useful not only to the multitracking musician, but also for post-production, film work, radio-type stuff, sample-and-loop madness, or just about any kind of audio work.
The interface is rather unique - perhaps a little less attractive than some other audio packages (and definitely no easier to figure out), but once you get used to it, the power and flexibility are impressive. The Multitrack View shows a horizontal display of your tracks, with various controls on the left, including solo and mute. Clicking on a little slider icon brings up a window with a volume and pan slider for that track. An effects icon brings up a dialog from which you can add real-time effects. The SoundFile view shows a single waveform for editing, the Regions View shows an alphabetical list of all defined Regions, and the Sequence View shows all the Regions on a selected track in time order (handy for tracks that consist of several Regions one after the other).
Recording in SAWPro
You can record in either the SoundFile View or the Multitrack View. If you record in the SoundFile View, the part you record will have no reference to time as far as the MultiTrack session is concerned. You can manually place it in the Multitrack View wherever you like. If you record directly in the Multitrack View, your recording will remain in sync with other audio data already placed in a MultiTrack session. In either case, hitting the record button brings up the record parameters window. Here you'll find a pair of audio meters, which are attractive and responsive, a resettable margin display, and a pair of sliders for adjusting the record levels. You can set the sample rate, resolution, and stereo or mono characteristics, in this window, and there are also a couple of time displays and some other nifty little buttons. You have to specify a filename before you start recording.
Whether you record within SAW, or bring in existing sound files, each track can be any supported sample rate and resolution, and it can be stereo or mono. In fact, you have 3 options when recording a track:
Stereo creates a stereo sound file, keeping left and right audio information intact
Mono L+R creates a mono sound file summing together the right and left audio information
Mono L/R creates one or two individual mono sound files keeping the left and right information separate.
This is definitely a program for grown-ups. Unlike Cakewalk, SAW doesn't hide your file management from you. In fact, you have to choose a filename before recording a track. This means that you have to think about organizing your sound files in a logical way. Actually, SAW doesn't care how they're organized, because a Region, the basic building block in SAW, is simply a set of pointers to a sound file. You can have one or two big sound files, or you can have sound files scattered all over your hard drive if you prefer. For backup purposes, however, you'll want to have your files logically grouped into projects.
Being a jump-in-without-reading-the-manual type, I made a rather comical error (or maybe it was a brilliant idea). I recorded a guitar track, and called it, rather unimaginatively, "guitar.wav." Later I was working on a completely different song, and specified "guitar.wav" as the sound file name for a new track. Later, in order to edit that region, I opened it in SoundFile View. This window shows you the sound file itself, allowing you to create or modify regions that reference the file. The Full View window also shows the sound file, but always shows the entire file at once. I was wondering why in the world my new guitar track seemed to comprise only the last third of the sound file, with a bunch of other stuff in front of it. I listened to the whole sound file, and realized that my guitar track from the other song was in there. When I had specified the already-existing "guitar.wav" as the file name to record to, SAW had simply appended my new recording to the existing sound file. It struck this newcomer to non-destructive editing as nuts! I guess old destructive habits die hard. In SAWPro's non-destructive environment, it doesn't make a darn bit of difference whether the sound file is referenced by 2 regions or by 200!
Personally, I like to back up songs individually, so I don't want them sharing sound files. So, just snip that file into two, and name one of them something else, eh? Not so fast - if you do, then the regions that refer to that file will get messed up, too.
This little story illustrates how you can paint yourself into a corner if you start major recording projects without reading the manual. However, it also illustrates the awesome power of SAWPro. The relationship between units of audio used within SAW and the actual sound files is totally flexible. What if you were creating a program for a radio station or some such, that required you to assemble various existing snippets in different ways? You could make each snippet its own sound file, or you could string them all together into one big file. Work however you prefer.
Real-time Audio Effects
SAW features several effects, and others can be added as plug-ins. Effects may be added to each track, using the Effects Patch Builder. Click on the FX icon for the desired track, and a dialog box opens up which allows you to create an effects patch for that particular track. Any or all of the available effects can be chosen, in any desired order. Double-clicking on the name of an effect brings up a window that lets you set the parameters for the effect. The effects included with SAWPro are:
Vari-Pitch/Speed
Reverse Audio
Reverse Phase
Center Channel Eliminator
Para-graphic Equalizer
Echo/Delay
Compressor/Gate/Limiter
DirectX Linker
VST Linker
The last 2 options let you use any effects plug-ins that you may have for DirectX or Steinberg's Cubase VST, respectively. There are also various effects plug-ins available from 3rd parties that plug directly into SAW. Effects can be applied in real-time. They are processor-intensive, however, so using a lot of effects may reduce the number of simultaneous tracks you can use.
Conclusion - Awesome, but Tough to Learn
Not to put too fine a point on it, SAWPro is not an easy program to figure out. This is actually due to several factors, at least for me. First of all, it's a darn powerful program, and with this many tools included, there's bound to be a bit of a learning curve. Also, for many of us, the whole concept of non-destructive editing is still a bit new. SAWPro leverages the power of non-destructive editing very heavily (the online manual gleefully explains how cheap hard drives are these days), and you have to figure out what's going on, or you can make a mess, as we have seen. The third factor that makes SAWPro tough to get started with is the fact that it doesn't always follow the Windows conventions you may be used to. As I mentioned, there are good reasons why the designers chose to bypass certain parts of the Windows interface, but it does mean taking some time to learn the commands.
Help is all online, of course, and is not really bad. At the risk of repeating myself, it will really behoove you to read through the online manual before diving in.
This is a high-powered product for audio professionals. In its particular circle, it's something of an industry standard, and the status is well deserved. I don't know that I would recommend SAWPro to an audio beginner. Newcomers to PC audio might be happier with one of Cakewalk's offerings, or with Voyetra's Digital Orchestrator Plus. But for anyone who's serious about multitrack audio, SAWPro is the power tool. Of course, a bewildering array of lesser versions of SAW are offered at lower prices.
There are a lot of nifty things about SAW Products, and about the company, Innovative Quality Software. They don't seem to subscribe to the pernicious practices that some other software outfits take for granted. Registered IQS customers get free downloadable updates for the life of the product. IQS also claims that when you install any IQS product on your computer, it will in no way affect your system registry or add any files to your system outside of its own folder. That sure sounds good to me!
