NGWave Audio/Sound/MP3 Editor: Typical Sound Editors

If you've read a little bit about NGWave, you already know that it is not your typical sound editing application. In this page, we explain how typical sound editors work, and why NGWave is different.

Redundant Data

When you perform an edit, most editors offer an Undo function. This means that the editor must have some way to revert your data back to the way it was. Most editors offer multiple levels of Undo. NGWave offers unlimited Undo levels.

The problem is apparent when you consider the following scenerio: delete 1 second of data from the beginning of a 5 minute sound file.

The typical editor must do the following:

• Make a copy of the entire file. This copy is what it will revert to when you click Undo
• Perform the requested edit -- delete the data
• Shift the entire file over by one second

So in all, you're copying the same data (5 minutes less one second) twice. This seems wasteful, doesn't it?

NGWave does this differently:

• Mark the first one second of audio as deleted. It will now skip that one second of data from now on, knowing that the data is no longer wanted.

This operation takes practically no time at all in NGWave. This principal applies to most edit functions; NGWave never copies the original data, instead skips the old data and jumps to the new, edited data.

In reality, this is based on a highly complex system. Other editors choose a more straight-forward approach. While it may seem to make sense, our approach outperforms other editors at most tasks, especially tasks where it's not necessary to copy data around.

To the user, of course, this is all transparent. NGWave functions like most others (barring some improvements to the interface design), so the complex internal system does not make the editor any more complicated.

Undo

When you click Undo, NGWave simply reverts back to the previous set of pointers, because the data itself has not moved. All of NGWave's unlimited Undo and Redo history can be accessed instantly.

Compare your current favorite sound editor with NGWave with our test scenerios. These are designed to show off the advantages of NGWave's superior performance in most any situation, using real-world situations. We challenge you to compare the performance with any other Windows-based editor available, and see for yourself.

One Channel Edit

Most editors store data in an interleaved format. This means that every odd-numbered sample represents the left channel, and every even sample the right.

This is all fine, until you decide to delete a small portion of just one channel. It now needs to copy all of the data for both channels, with one offset a little bit.

NGWave keeps each channel independant, so deleting from one channel is no different from deleting from both. In other words, this operation also takes place instantly, allowing you to quickly and easily shift one channel by some amount of time.

Note that some editors -- even some that are so-called professional -- don't even allow you to delete data from just one channel of a stereo file. They require you to cut and paste that data in order to perform this same one-channel shift operation, which is itself a painfully slow operation.

Zero Data

Most editors will fill your disk with zeros -- literally -- when you Mute or Insert Silence. NGWave simply flags those sections as being silent, or zero, and avoids taking up valuable storage space (and time to read/write) for data that is already known to be all zeros.

Conclusions

It all boils down to the internal logic used. Most editors use the old-fashioned methods of moving large amounts of data around. NGWave uses its own revolutionary format which involves simply moving pointers around. Instead of moving audio data, which is often quite large, NGWave changes where it is pointing to the data.

We broke away from the conventional methods of building an audio editor. NGWave uses round-robin, multi-thread-safe FIFO buffers for audio playback; a revolutionary pointer system to optimize data access, data editing, and eliminate redundancy; unmatched wave-display technology; and a completely unique and sample-accurate peaks system storing two levels of peaks for fast display refresh.

Rather than being stuck in old ways of thinking, every aspect of NGWave is completely new, and more logical than anything else on the market. All of this is completely transparent to the user -- until you realize just how much more productive you can be when you're not staring at progress dialogs for most of your session.