Fission - 1.6.6

I have been using Fission since v1.0 and continue to be impressed with it. My needs are relatively simple: I record and edit 2-hour talks for others in the classes we all attend. Fission does almost all I need and does it beautifully, its only lack being an inability to mark different areas of a talk to (briefly) remind myself of what was said at what point in time. This is, understandably, never going to be a high priority for the developers as it's such a specialised need, but the other day when I upgraded to v1.6.5 and found that the Fade Out command now crashed the app, Rogue Amoeba fixed the problem within 3 days of my reporting it and wrote to let me know. Kudos and thanks to them!

One word: impressive! We had a sizable, 12 hour audio book that the likes of Final Cut Studio 2, QuictimePro, Audacity, et al just couldn't cope with. We discovered Fission and it breezed through the edits and exports with ease. The integrated ID3 tagging just added the icing when creating podcasts and audio books. Seriously powerful piece of kit and highly recommended, certainly for it's price point.

Another review says "simple, elegant, effective" and Fission certainly is that. The interface is excellent. One other thing the other reviews don't mention: it will work on files others won't. I did over an hours recording of an event with spoken word and music into *.WAV. The mixer desk did "something" because the file was corrupted part way through. MAC OS X would not even copy the file and other tools refused to work on it. Fission did and edited it. Great relief. Thanks.

I've been using Fission for professionally archiving and re-posting streaming internet radio programming since it's release. Despite claims made below, all fully-featured sound file editors convert MP3s to PCM audio before editing and then must re-encode when editing is done. This results in a serious quality hit, which might be an acceptable trade off if you must process and change the signal- however, if all you want to do is edit MP3s with no change to the signal and no loss in quality, Fission is the only option. It's also a great option. It's been fast and reliable, Rogue Amoeba keeps refining it, support is top-notch and there has not yet been any charge for any upgrade. I think $30 is more than fair for this, however I only paid $18 because I am a user of Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro. The only feature missing for me is to take multiple MP3s and simply concatenate them. That's the only reason I still have MP3 Trimmer on my computer. If you need to do full featured audio editing from a variety of formats using plug-ins, etc., there are many options for the Mac, both commercial and shareware. If you need lossless, easy MP3 editing, you need Fission.

This is not the end-all sound mixing and editing program. Nonetheless, it does something really important that my other tools all lack: Lossless editing of MP3s. I routinely receive raw audio transcripts of conference calls that I need to add to a business training podcast. But there is always garbage that needs to be trimmed out. Before Fission, I had to decompress the file in another sound editor, make my edits and recompress as MP3. Since the fidelity of the original files is mediocre, I'd have to resave at a higher sample rate than the original, resulting in a larger (though shorter) audio file that still suffered some quality loss.

Now with fission, I can make quick lossless edits. I save time and file size, and quality is better. The product paid for itself on the first use. I'm looking forward to enjoying version 1.5 as well, as RA has added the ability to adjust gain and join files.

Fantastic! There should be more software written like this: simple, elegant and effective. This is well-worth the price!

Brett Chaffer
Structure Interactive