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The premiere Mac editing program climbs another peak

At one point. Peak was the only option for Mac-based digital audio editing. Alchemy had vanished, Digidesign abandoned Sound Designer II to pursue Pro Tools, TCs ill-fated Spark hadn't yet appeared, and i3's DSP Quattro was still a few years off. Peak 1.0 was initially a bit rough around the edges, but at least made it possible to do serious audio editing on a Mac.

Over the years, though. Peak (now at V5.2, with Universal support) has matured into a stable, serious, and creativity-friendly program (Figure 1). It "turned the corner" with version 4, which embraced Mac OS X to the fullest, remedied some annoying omissions, and cleaned up the workflow. Although its roster of plug-ins was limited, the new Peak Pro 5.2 XT package (which lists for twice as much as Peak 5.2) makes up for lost time with a solid, and sometimes inspired, suite of plug-ins called Master Perfection Suite.

While Peak 5.2 includes the Freq-4 (4-band parametric) and Sqweez compressor/limiter, the XT version adds GateEx (gate/downward expander), PitchCraft (pitch correction/transposition), Repli-Q (linear phase EQ/spectral matching). Reveal (suite of analysis tools), SoundSoap 2 ("one-click" noise reduction and restoration), SoundSoap Pro (more flexible version of SoundSoap 2), Sqweez-3 and Sqweez-5 (linear phase 3-band and 5-band compressor/limiter respectively), and SuperFreq-4, SuperFreq-6, SuperFreq-8, and SuperFreq-10 (4, 6, 8, and 10-band parametric EQs, respectively). Note that these plug-ins (except both SoundSoaps) cannot be used with sequencing hosts as of this writing, but a free update is planned that allows AU, VST, and RTAS compatibility.

GETTING STARTED

Peak works in trial mode for 14 days; you then need to authorize (online or phone, and it's painless - BIAS has made the dongle optional). The Master Perfection Suite of plug-ins do require a dongle (included) for the time being; the SoundSoaps get registered online.

As there's a demo you can check out for yourself, instead of covering...

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