Review: Magix Audio Cleaning Labs 12 XXL music software
Date : 01 02 2008 Category : Technology
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Tim Smith, Personal Computer World, Thursday 3 January 2008 at 00:00:00
Breathe new life into your old recordings
We all have recordings that are less than pristine but still worth hanging on to, be it a show from the radio, an old vinyl LP or a recording of a concert. Magix Audio Cleaning Labs 12 XXL is a software studio for restoring audio recordings and is bundled with a preamp for recording directly from sources such as vinyl turntables and cassette players. The software follows the standard Magix format of a step-by-step approach with dedicated buttons for quickly adjusting the main settings. There are several videos included within the Tasks menu that explain some of the more complicated filters such as the spectral cleaning. This is nothing to do with ghosts, but rather an effective way of removing noise from a recording without deleting the audio behind it. Adding audio to a project can be as simple as loading an audio file or ripping a CD. The options for recording are very flexible with presets for vinyl, tape and internet. Recording can also be set for a certain time and duration. A USB-powered preamp is also supplied. This is particularly useful because it is much easier to bring just a turntable to a computer rather than a whole stereo system; the preamp is needed because the output from turntables is too low to work with an ordinary soundcard. The preamp has RCA sockets for turntables and a 3.5mm jack socket for attaching other audio sources, such as a cassette player. Even though these devices can be plugged directly into soundcards, the USB socket is less likely to require scrabbling around the back. During testing, we found the Audio ID identification tool didnít work with a variety of tracks from big names such as Led Zeppelin, Gene and KT Tunstall. There is, however, a useful link to the Freedb.org website for searching for albums by title or artist. Once the album has been found the specific link can be entered into Audio Cleanup Lab for it to apply the information to the different tracks. The cleaning section is where the software shines against alternatives such as the open-source Audacity. There are plenty of presets for different recordings, such as those made from cassette tape or LP, as well as several automatic modes. They may not be perfect, but make a very useful starting point. The effects are all visible and split into two sections: cleaning and mastering. Each section has a one-click option for adjusting the settings automatically....
