Fission: Lossless Audio Editing

Posted by Anthony Agius on 07/13/07 in Audio, Home & Personal, Productivity

Fission Logo Rogue Amoeba has been a favorite developer of mine for quite a while. Apps like Audio Hijack and Airfoil have proved immensely useful for me over the years. Their latest release is Fission, another slick app that joins their stable of audio related tools.

Fission makes it brain-dead easy to chop and slice audio for whatever purpose. The commands are straightforward and the beauty of Fission is that it can edit MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF with no loss of quality. In some programs, you need to convert an MP3 to a WAV or AIFF file, then edit and re-compress. Not so in Fission, which translates into excellent quality audio.

It’s ideal for situations where you want to split a long MP3 up into multiple files, as you can chop your file up at once in Fission, and then export the sections you’ve created into individual files. Perfect for live concerts or radio shows.

Creating ringtones from your favourite songs is also a cinch with Fission, saving you the hassles and dangers of scouring dodgy websites, or even paying a dubious source for a 10 second tone. This sort of stuff can easily done in other apps (even free apps) like Garageband or Audacity, but Fission’s simplicity and lossless MP3 editing puts it in a class of it’s own.

Fission Screenshot

It’s ease of use makes it a dream for any novice, or even something quick and simple for the pro who just needs to get things done. Fission is available for US$32, although a full feature demo is available. However, the quality of audio saved with the demo will be degraded with a series of audio fades.

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5 Comment(s)

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Andreas said on

July 13th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

I’m a big fan of Fission myself. It’s a very handy tool to cutting up sound files and the like. Think of it like Audacity, only for Mac (yes I know Audacity “works” on the Mac, but you know what I mean). Definitely worth the price in my opinion.

Miles Evans said on

July 14th, 2007 at 3:13 pm

I agree Fission is far and away the best audacity replacement app, and the interface is quite delicious as well. Well worth $32.

Michael De Leon said on

July 15th, 2007 at 7:08 pm

Fission is ok, I’ve tried a bunch of Mac audio editing apps including Fission, Amadeus Pro, Audacity, Sound Studio. For my needs, I settled on Bias Peak. Soundtrack Pro is also good as a multi track arranging and editing program. I usually use both for my podcast.Audacity is a pretty good piece of software for free. I wish someone would give it a facelift and add a few more features.

Marvin Sum said on

July 15th, 2007 at 9:48 pm

How does this app compare with something like GarageBand?

-1

Miles Evans said on

July 16th, 2007 at 7:56 am

Fission is more of a quick and dirty audio editing and conversion tool rather than a full blown robust editor/sampler with effects etc like GB. If I have an audio file that just needs a small fragment trimmed out, I pop open Fission.