ZACK WHEATCROFT: Hi. Thanks for coming by the BIAS booth at Musikmesse. I'm Zack Wheatcroft from BIAS. I'm going to show you some highlights in Peak Pro 6 and let's go ahead and take a look and get started.

So the first thing we're going to look at is one of the new DSP tools in Peak. It's called Perpetual Looper and it's designedm to kind of just add in to what Peak already does in terms of editing loops. Where other looping tools use change of amplitude at the beginning and end of the loop, Perpetual Looper does an actual pitch change in this area before and after the loop and makes a really nice sustained loop. So, let's play the sample we're going to try and loop.

[ZACK PLAYS LOOP]

So, this section here we want to make a nice, sustaining loop. What we want to do is [ZACK APPLIES LOOPER]. So you can see here, as we're playing that loop, it kind of fluctuates in level. It's not as smooth as could be. So, by selecting over the area of the loop and choosing Perpetual Looper from the DSP menu, I get a DSP window that comes up with a lots of options, I'll choose the right frequency range for this, and now let's preview and hear what it sounds like.

[ZACK APPLIES PERPETUAL LOOPER TO LOOP]

So, it results in a much smoother loop. I can now process this, send it to my sampler, and then when I hold down the appropriate key, it's going to loop smoothly forever. That's why we call it Perpetual Looper. So, let's take a looka at another DSP tool. Peak has recently been really popular in the area of podcasting. It was voted best in show for the last couple of years at the podcast and portable media expo s we've added a few more tools, and let's take a look.

So what we've got here, we've got a bit of a voice over, and we want to add that into our finished podcast material, so here's my intro [ZACK PLAYS PODCAST]. Okay, so let's go in and take that. We'll copy that. What we want to do is drop it into the rest of our content and have it automatically fade out the other content so we can hear the voiceover section. So we do that with the new Voiceover Ducking tool. So open that up, and what you have are various options here for how you're going to blend it in, so you can adjust attack and decay, and let's adjust the ducking amount here so we go to -12 and process and see how this works out. So, in this area, you can see I just dropped in my bit of voiceover, let's get it a bit of pre-roll and see how that sounds.

[ZACK PLAYS PODCAST]

So that's cool. One thing that makes this really handy though is when you have something like this file where you have kind of a canned intro and conclusion that you're going to use in every episode, it makes it really fast to add these in so you select the whole file that is kind of like your template file, come over to your podcast content, and now since we have two sections of dialogue with silence between them, what it lets me do is control the minimum amount of silence between duckings. Here I have more than one second, so what that means is that the background audio is going to come back up to its normal level after my intro, so let's try this. So we'll come in here, select -- oops, let's undo. So we will start right there and choose Voiceover Ducking, click OK. Okay, so here's what it's put in the beginning and then it's put in the conclusion at the end and it's blended in really nicely. So, let's hear how that end one sounds.

[ZACK PLAYS PODCAST ENDING]

So it makes it real easy. When you're finished putting your podcast together, go to the file menu and choose published podcast. Peak encodes as MP3, AAC, uploads to your server so it acts as an FTP client in that capacity, and creates an RSS feed so your user or your listeners can subscribe to your show in iTunes or another podcast aggregator.

Another new feature that's handy is sending a track right into iTunes, so Peak and iTunes work a little more closely now. Since iTunes is such a great way to organize your music, you can now just drop a file from peak into iTunes, you can take things from iTunes right into Peak as a document or into a playlist. So, another thing that's new is -- well, the whole interface that we're looking at here has a new kind of a dark color. It can be shaded anywhere between completely white, completely black, or anywhere in between to suit your preferences. The other thing is magnetic windows, so as I drag these windows around, they're snapping to a magnetic grid, and we're still working on this. This version's not finished yet so we got a couple of things to work on.

Let's see. Another option we have here is Cache and RAM. This is a really cool feature on systems where have just loads and loads of RAM. When you're doing extensive DSP processing like change duration or change pitch, what happens is you're initially reading the file to RAM and all your edits and all your processing that streams to and from the disk is happening in RAM, so there's the initial open and then there's the final save, and that's the only two times Peak is accessing the hard drive, and it makes DSP processing up to 500% faster. It's a really cool feature.