Recording - August 2013 - 44

BY BILL STUNT

Audiofile Engineering Triumph
editing. Configurable content bars are
above and below the Waveform window,
to see lists of your edits, output channels
and loops.
On the right, in the “Details” window,
you can display Properties that include a
very extensive list of metadata associated
with the file, results of various analysis
routines you can run (a very useful feature), all of the files you’ve rendered, and
a history of CD burns.

An unusual approach to waveform editing on the Mac
Audiofile Engineering has replaced its
longstanding program Wave Editor with this
newly designed program called Triumph. A
new audio editing tool, one that is designed
to handle tasks from basic audio editing to
sound design and mastering, is welcome
news for audio professionals (and serious
amateurs) working on the Mac platform.
In-depth waveform editing is an application field that has not been well supported on
the Mac. After the demise of Digidesign
Sound Designer years ago and BIAS Peak
more recently, Mac equivalents to PC programs like Steinberg Wavelab and Sony
Sound Forge have been few and far
between, with lesser-known programs like
Wave Editor and DSP-Quattro vying for attention with the relatively recently-ported Adobe
Audition (last reviewed September 2012).
Triumph offers some new ways of working
that will get any Mac user’s attention.
At first glance
When you first open Triumph you are
presented with a very clean, very Maclike environment. The uncluttered workspace has a sparse toolbar and a somewhat shocking (for an audio program)
lack of menu selections. You may ask
yourself, as I did, “Where is everything?”
44

RECORDING August 2013

The programmers have chosen to tuck
almost all of the functionality under icons
that only appear when you hover over the
area where you need them. The function
dialogs (“popovers” in Apple-speak) open
when you click on them. This lack of permanent icons and graphics is a bit startling
at first. As I became more familiar with
Triumph, I came to appreciate the cleanliness of the desktop. Akin to a clean physical desktop when starting out on a task,
Triumph’s virtual desktop is equally Zen-like
and conducive to a long session of work,
nice and restful for the eyes and brain.
The program presents itself completely on
a single screen divided into 3 vertical sections. The left-most window is the “Sources”
window. Here you’ll find all of the components of your editing project. Sources
include Assets (audio files), Labels (markers),
Effects (plug-ins), Shapes (envelope curves),
and Actions (routines you would normally
find in a menu drop-down list, like render or
normalize or add tracks etc.).
The middle window, labelled “Content”,
consists of a waveform overview of all the
layers of audio in your project workspaces
and a more detailed view of the layer you
have highlighted to work on. This center
window is where you do your actual audio

Getting to work with layers
Triumph doesn’t record audio; to work
in Triumph you need to import audio. You
can do this by dragging from the Finder
to the Sources window, or by using the
Import command from the File menu, or
by clicking on the Import toolbar menu
button (an optional icon you can add).
These options are all pretty standard.
The workflow from here on in is idiosyncratic and takes some explaining. The concept here has been described as being more
akin to working in the visual realm. Triumph
uses “layers” much like Photoshop does. A
bit alien at first, it’s actually very powerful,
and an interesting and effective way to
work. The concept lends itself well to audio.
Every project starts with an automatically created Master Layer. It’s useful to

Recording - August 2013

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