Review of Rogue Amoeba's Fission
by DJ Deckard

Fission is an audio editor which has a fairly narrow focus. It's feature set as found on developer Rogue Amoeba's website is as follows:

- Software that will losslessly edit MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF files without any need for re-encoding
- Splitting a long recording into multiple files
- Removing unwanted audio such as commercials
- Adding fade in and out
- Creating mp3 and AAC cell phone ringtones

The program looks and feels like a slimmed down Sony Sound Forge. I mean that as a compliment as Sound Forge is my audio editor of choice. The controls are nicely divided at the top of the screen and grouped by their functionality.

My main use for Fission was to be editing a long recording into individual tracks I am a DJ and upon finishing up my latest demo mix I need to take the final WAV file and turn it into individual tracks for the CD.

To begin my task I use the cursor and player controls to figure out where in the mix I want to split the audio into tracks. Once you find the appropriate place in the audio file you zoom in, select the Split cursor, and click the audio where you want the split to occur. Easy. Really easy.

I repeated this process for each track and using their Inspector tool named each track and then to finish the process hit Save Audio. Presto you now have multiple WAV files instead of one big one.

Splitting audio into separate tracks couldn’t be easier

Performing all the functionality within Fission is just as easy. To create a ring tone you load an audio file and using the Select cursor select the portion of the audio file you would like to use. A nice feature here is upon holding down the mouse button and moving the cursor the audio plays from wherever the beginning of the selection is currently at. Find a desired audio selection, hit the Crop button, Save Audio and you now have a ring tone.

The bottom line is that Rogue Amoeba’s Fission does exactly what it says it’s going to do. The features all work as expected, the interface is easy to use and looks nice. For the features they advertise and the overall experience I would give this 5 stars.

For my final score I decided to drop it to 4 stars based on the relative value. There are freeware programs out there that will do everything Fission will do though probably without the nice interface and ease of use. I would be more comfortable recommending Fission if the price were a tad lower than the current $32 price point.

Finally I write this last portion hoping that Rogue Amoeba will read this and take it in to consideration for future versions.

I was disappointed to realize that if I closed Fission I would not be able to further edit my DJ mix. If I made any mistakes I would have to open the original WAV file and make the same edits again. Rogue Amoeba, please consider adding this functionality to your next version.

A second request, though beyond the scope of their stated feature set, is to add the ability to burn the audio to CD. Honestly, I don’t know how much work would be required to do this, but if it were possible (perhaps in a Fission Pro version at a higher price point) you would have a direct competitor to CD Architect for the PC and would make me very happy indeed.

spacespace
Cropping Audio is a breezespaUsing Fission's inspector you can fully tag your audio

Likes:
- Look and Feel
- Ease of use

Dislikes:
- See feature requests

Feature requests:
- Save functionality
- Ability to burn to CD




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