Sound Editor Deluxe 7.1

Unlike it happens with other applications with pompous names and much less functionality than one would expect from such bombastic titles, Sound Editor Deluxe is certainly a “deluxe” utility.

It not only offers all the bells and whistles of professional audio editing tools, but also a set of other related utilities that makes it a truly comprehensive, full-featured application.

The audio editing section’s highlight is its waveform editing window. Here you can perform all the editing tasks you may think of plus a number of extra functions. You can select and cut or copy audio sections with a level of accuracy down to the millisecond. Besides, its zoom in and out capabilities will allow you to work on tiny segments with ease and confidence. Cutting and copying audio is only the beginning – here you will find a command bar complete with amplitude, compression, delay, echo, modulation, normalization, time, and pitch adjustments, just to name some of them. You are given specific tools to restore your audio, especially that good old audio coming from the analog world, with its tape hiss and its vinyl pops and clicks. You can invert the channels and reverse full audio tracks, clean the beginning and end of noisy vinyl tracks and equalize them until they sound just the way they should. As any other audio editor, Sound Editor Deluxe can also be used as an audio converter – just open a file and save it selecting a different codec among the many supported by the program, including the most popular ones.

These audio editing features alone would be the enough reason to label this program as “deluxe”. However, it offers you a variety of extra functions and utilities that make it truly deserve that title. Not only can you open any existing audio file and edit it at will, but also extract audio from any existing video file and – what is more – from any video you can download from YouTube. Actually, you don’t even need to do it yourself using a third-party YouTube downloader – the program can download the video and extract its audio in one single operation. To top it all off, Sound Editor Deluxe comes with a frequency analyzer and a text-to-speech utility to transform into audio any text you can type or paste using any of the synthetic voices installed on your system.

The wide array of features, together with the fact that some of them can be accessed from two or three different locations in the main window, might make the program’s interface a bit confusing at times. To compensate for this, it offers you a “favorites” tab, where you can add, delete, and edit your favorite actions and add hotkeys to them for easy and fast access.

Whatever way you use it, this is a tool worth trying and recommending to anyone in need of a full-featured and affordable audio editing tool.