XO Wavers,

Someone recently asked me about the soft editing feature in XO
Wave. This is not well documented right now, so I thought I'd post some
info about it here to shed some light on the situation:

Edit Softening allows for automatic removing of discontinuities that often
occur at edit points. Imagine, for example, you have a bass track with a
region on it. Now imagine that you trim the front to a point where the
signal is strong. During playback, the audio will jump from zero to that
high value in the space of one sample. This creates a loud POP sound that
is not only annoying, but it's potentially bad for your speakers (and your
ears, too!). Edit softening is XO Wave's way of automatically
eliminating these horrible sounds.[1]

Edit softening occurs during playback, so your edit window and waveforms
won't look any different, and you can easilly audition with edit softening
on or off, without having to re-edit. Also, edit softening only changes
the behavior of "normal" edits, not fades, since fades are already their
own type of softening.

Edit Softening is always on by default, but can be turned on and off on a
per-track basis: just click on the Edit Softening button in the track
Control Panel. (for more about the Track Control panel, go here:
http://www.xowave.com/doc/window/edit.shtml#TrackControlPanel) You can
double click the button for more options.

The defaults work like this: no audio is played off a region until zero is
crossed, and the last 30 samples of each region are linearly faded out.
We have found that this works well for virtually all situations.


Hope that helps!

bjorn

[1] some musicians, such as the Postal Service, have used this type of
"popping" as a special effect. You can do so, but I suggest you try and
keep the levels of the pops low so as not to damage anything. One option
for reducing the side-effects without eliminating that POP, is to set the
Edit Softening features to use very short fade ins, of say 5 samples.



-------------
Bjorn Roche
Check out my CD Mastering Software
for Mac OS X : http://www.xowave.com