GoldWave 6.76

GoldWave has made a name in the professional audio editing field for the last two decades for all the right reasons – a comprehensive set of editing features, outstanding audio cleaning functions, superb waveform graphics, and simplicity of use. Its intuitive interface is the perfect wrapping for one of the most comprehensive catalogs of enhancing, cleaning, and editing tools available.

Though known as a high-end editing tool, GoldWave will also allow you to record any audio coming into your computer through its sound card. You can open various audio files simultaneously and view them as high-quality waveform graphs. You can then select portions – with an accuracy of a tenth of a millisecond! – out of these files to create a new one or to mix them, or to append them anywhere in other file, or whatever any other editing operation you can think of.

Thanks to this combination of recording and editing features, GoldWave is extensively used in analog-to-digital audio conversion. The program offers customizable settings to help you remove any clicks, pops, tape hiss, or any other artifact present in the analog source. The results are astonishing – clear digital renditions without harming the original sound in any way.

The list of effects, filters, and other enhancing functions presented in GoldWave are simply too long to list here. The possibilities are endless, and they range from the most basic – fade in and out, normalization, equalization, etc. – to the most sophisticated ones, using mathematical equations to perform the most incredible sounds.

GoldWave 6 is still in beta and available for testing purposes only, which means that some of the features we all know and love are not still there or not with the same level of reliability that a GoldWave user should expect. This beta version looks like a big leap forward for this 21-year-old classic. First of all, you will need a 64-bit Windows 7 environment to enjoy testing this beta, as the new GoldWave will support up to 8 channels and will require access to more than 2 GB of memory. This new version has increased the size of the many buttons that have traditionally filled up the upper side of the interface. This is certainly a nice and welcome enhancement on the usability side.

Other significant changes, thought not that visible for the end user, refer to the way the program has improved its efficiency and processing speed by using memory storage by default, instead of your hard drive, though this is only an option. Custom user settings will not be carried over to this new version 6 when released, a novelty that long-time users will not certainly welcome. This is consequence of the new way of storing these settings from this version onwards – as a standard XML file instead of as an entry in the Windows registry.

The future stable version of GoldWave 6 will certainly mean a great improvement in a tool that has been hard to improve for twenty years. In the meantime, I recommend you to give this one a try and see for yourself the things it can do for your audio files.