For anyone serious about direct-to-disk recording using a PC and a sound card, this new system from Turtle Beach has plenty to offer - as Ian Waugh discovers...

If the PC has done anything for musicians, it's to make an increasing number of powerful music and recording tools available at cheaper prices. We've been rabbiting on about PC sound cards and direct-to-disk (DTD) recording in MT for the past few months so you probably know by now that you can buy a PC sound card which can handle 16-bit stereo recording at 44.1 kHz for less than £200.

Most of these cards come with some form of DTD software which is fine for messing about with, for creating Email voice messages and the like. However, for more serious musical creativity you will probably want something a bit more sophisticated. Something like Wave for Windows, for example.

Wave is a program for recording and editing digital audio files. You need a PC sound card, too, and Wave will work with most cards including Sound Blaster and Media Vision and their clones as well as Turtle Beach's more upmarket cards such as MultiSound. In fact it should work with any MPC (Multimedia PC) card.

If you want to sample at 16bit and 44.1kHz the card must support this of course, and the program will only present you with options supported by the card you're using. I ran the system with the Sound Blaster 16 ASP card. You also need a PC running Windows 3.1. The docs recommend a 386SX, but if you haven't already bought a PC it's worth spending a bit extra for a 486 (several PC manufacturers have already stopped making 386s). Installation is as automatic as a PC installation can be.

The program works a little like a sampler. In fact, if you've ever used one of the Replay family of samplers for the Atari ST or Commodore Amiga you'll already be half way there. One of Wave's main differences is that it records direct-to-disk so the amount of RAM in your PC doesn't limit the length of the recording you can make. Though as with all digital recording systems, the higher the quality of the recording, the more storage space it will use. A stereo 16-bit recording sampled at 44.1kHz will consume 10Mb of space per minute. However, hard disks are far cheaper than RAM chips so DTD is very cost effective.

Wave is a highly graphic program. It has one main window but that belies the wealth of features within. The window is actually the waveform display area; you can actually work with four of these windows - each a sample file - making it easy to cut, copy and paste data between them. Editing, however, is destructive. That is, it alters the actual data file on the disk. The program can create a backup file for you but this is optional because, of course, the backup file itself requires disk space which you may not have or wish to devote to a backup. In any case, the program has a useful Undo feature so if you're sensible, the dangers of editing without a backup are minimised.

To record, you simply open a file for the data - this is known as a soundfile - and select the sample rate and resolution. There are no level adjustment controls although there are level meters so you must set the volume on the sound source itself or via a mixer program which usually comes with most sound cards. I must admit I never had any problem with volume levels.

Because you may be working with a file which is 40 or 50Mb in size, Wave has an overview display above the waveform which shows which part of the file is currently displayed. The manual recommends you limit the size of the edit window to around 10 seconds in order to minimise the time it takes to draw the waveform. In fact, waveform redraws are pretty fast.

A couple of sliders are used to zoom in and out in both horizontal and vertical directions and alter the scale, so it's easy to home in on a specific area for editing. You can view the waveform in units of time, samples, beats or SMPTE. It's quite easy, therefore, to see exactly where you are in the file. Wave also lets you name and place up to 256 markers to assist when finding your way around long files - although the marker positions are not saved to disk (an update promises to remedy this).

Things start to get interesting when you look at the edit options. As well as the usual cut, copy and paste operations which you can perform on any sample-based program worthy of the name. Wave has a wealth of other processing tools. These can be applied to the entire file or just a selected area. One tool, the pencil, is used to draw in waveform data. As everyone who has every tried to draw an original waveform knows - this is impossible! However, the pencil is useful for removing spikes in the waveform which otherwise cause clicks - though this can still sometimes be a tricky operation.

Six of Wave's tools have several parameters - Equaliser, Auto Stutter, Cyborg voice, Distortion, Flange, Digital Delay, Reverb. The EQ tool, for example, has four sets of gain, centre frequency and bandwidth controls. The delay has delay time, feedback and output mix controls. You can, therefore create a large number of different, quite precise, effects. However, it would be rather time consuming to have to adjust all the settings each time you want a particular effect, so Wave uses a system of Presets which are just that - a particular set of parameters applied to a tool. You can create and save up to 50 presets for each tool and the program comes with well over 100 presets already assembled.

Some of the tools can take quite a long time to process a file and you could be left twiddling your thumbs for several minutes, especially if the file is of any length. You also need to be careful how much effect you apply. The algorithms are good but over-processing can introduce noise or distortion to a file.

Wave has several customisation options. You can alter the cursor blink speed and change the colours of the various areas of the program, although I personally think the default colours have a nice hi-tech feel to them and they are certainly good to work with. Finally, it's worth mentioning that Wave comes with a useful little CD Player utility which can be made to sit on top of your current window. You can flip from track to track but you can't move to a position halfway through a track as you may well want to do if you are recording from a CD (having paid any due MCPS rights, of course).

In use, Wave works extremely well. It makes it easy to chop up and put back together an audio track, insert samples, process areas of the waveform and generally play fast and loose with whatever audio signals you can get onto your hard disk. However, although data is recorded digitally, Wave is very much a linear recording device like a traditional tape recorder. For example, it has no looping points and there is no system of cues which are used by some other DTD systems. Cues, of course, demand a degree of processing power from the computer and a certain level of hard disk performance as the program may have to read and play quickly in succession, data situated in several different places on the disk. On top of that, some DTD programs apply effects in real time which is a further drain upon the system. For serious digital recording, cues are certainly the most flexible editing method and they also preserve the integrity of the file as editing is non-destructive. But Wave will work with a fairly low-end system and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg so you have to take that into account.

Another area which may concern potential users is synchronisation. Although Wave can display time in SMPTE format or beats, it has no direct MIDI or SMPTE synchronisation facility. You cannot, therefore, create a MIDI backing track, play it back and use Wave to record the vocals. Well you could, but after the recording there is no simple way to synchronise the two programs.

To get these sort of facilities you'll need a more heavyweight program such as SAW which we'll be looking at in MT very soon. Look upon Wave as a stereo audio tape machine with vastly superior editing facilities and you won't go far wrong. Of course, it's rather more than a tape recorder substitute; certainly, its editing facilities make it a good choice for the creation of soundtracks for multimedia work, for example, or the production of specialised sound effects.

The manual is very friendly with a sprinkling of humour, although apart from a few introductory sections, it's more a reference guide than a tutorial. It includes an introduction to sampling, a section of recording hints and it has a reasonable index. The program also has an excellent on-line Help system.

There are one or two 't's to cross and 'i's to dot - but nothing major. The manual is aware of shortcomings in some areas and promises a few enhancements in future updates. I've been using Wave for testing sound cards (see feature in our April issue). It's flexible, it works extremely well and it's infinitely better than Windows' recording devices. For pure digital recording it's an excellent program.

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