Review: BIAS Peak 2.1

Peak's playlist offers a way to arrange sequences of audio, apply real-time DSP effects and burn directly to a CD-R.

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Review: BIAS Peak 2.1 [ continued]

One of my favorite Peak functions, which dates back to early versions, is Threshold. This feature acts like a gate in that you can specify an attack and release threshold and gain setting, and a minimum duration time, but instead of processing the file, it inserts markers at points where the “gate” would open and close, thereby intelligently breaking the file up into regions. As you adjust the parameters in one window, you can see the markers being created in the main window, so getting the settings right is quick and intuitive. Once you've got those markers in place, you can export each region into its own file.

Peak's support of MIDI samplers has become much more stable. Formerly, complex SMDI networks could confuse the program, and if you didn't specify your source files and targets in the sampler absolutely correctly and consistently, the program wouldn't help you out, and in fact would often crash. The new routines make it much easier to get those numbers right, and the program is far more forgiving of both human and electronic error. Code for dealing with specific Akai, E-mu, Ensoniq, Peavey, Kurzweil, Roland and Yamaha SMDI-compatible samplers is now included, and my tests with a Kurzweil K2000 and a K2500 went perfectly.

Loop functions have improved as well: The task of finding loop points is helped greatly thanks to, along with standard Loop Tuner and crossfade loop functions, something called Loop Surfer, which creates a loop according to user-specified beat lengths and tempo. And if you don't know the tempo of the file you're looking at, a Guess Tempo function analyzes the peaks and troughs in the waveform and figures out—reasonably successfully—what the tempo is.

Another of Peak's most attractive capabilities is its Batch Processing feature. You can set up any number of input, processing and output options, save them as a “script,” and then, simply by dropping files from the desktop onto Peak's icon (or an alias), all the files will be processed and dumped to the folder of your choice, while you go and have lunch. The interface is not quite as clear as it could be, but once you figure it out, you can do some very slick moves like import a dual-mono file, normalize it, knock out everything above 10 kHz, and save it as a RealAudio 5.0 stereo file (with the proper file extension) on a different disk.

Along with all the new features, the user interface has undergone a radical change, with “Goo”-like controls in a Toolbar that stretches across the entire screen. The buttons are a little too small and their icons a little ambiguous for my taste, but a welcome touch is that when you move the mouse over a button, a text window at the bottom tells you what the tool does. You can customize the Toolbar, or if you find it really annoying, you can simply hide the whole thing and use the menus and keyboard shortcuts. You can customize your own keyboard shortcuts and make a little “cue card” text file you can print out (there's a Filemaker template for this included).

Hardware issues
If you have used Peak in the past with Digidesign hardware, you probably know that the program and Digi stuff haven't always gotten along well together. In previous versions, when playing audio from an Audiomedia card or Pro Tools system, you had to use Apple's Sound Manager, and get the appropriate drivers from Digidesign. Dealing with incompatibilities between various system versions and extensions to get Peak running was like putting together a moving jigsaw puzzle, and in my experience it never worked perfectly; often, weird clicks or buzzes would get into the playback, although the files themselves were never affected. In 2.1 (except for the LE version), BIAS has finally included direct DAE support, and those particular playback issues are gone. But unfortunately, now there are other problems. For one thing, you can't use dynamic scrubbing with DAE. Even more inconvenient, Peak's native file format is not compatible with DAE, and so every time you import, process or save a file, Peak has to create a DAE Play file, so that you can hear what you're doing. This slows the program down enormously; in effect, it doubles the time it takes to do any operation. There is an ASIO driver available that is supposed to work with Pro Tools systems, which presumably would avoid these problems, but even after several weeks of trying to get it to work with my venerable Nubus-based Pro Tools III hardware, and many calls to the company, I could not get it functional. The folks at BIAS say that Digi's DAE technology is at fault; it simply can't deal with stereo files, but that doesn't solve the problem.

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