KRISTAL Audio Engine 1.0.1

5 from 1 Reviews

KRISTAL Audio Engine is an excellent idea for anyone looking to get started with recording, mixing and mastering digital audio.

The application has a modular design; the main application provides the mixing console, while other features, such as the live audio input and the audio sequencer were added as separate plugins.

What you can do in KRISTAL Audio Engine before anything else is creating new songs. The program’s friendly interface allows you to load various audio files and arrange them to create a new piece.

There are 16 audio tracks available in KRISTAL Audio Engine, and you can easily resize, cut and edit every item that you load.

The main component of this audio processing suite is the 32 bit floating point KRISTAL Audio Engine, a powerful tool providing downmix to 16/24/32 bit audio files, 2 VST insert slots per channel, 3 VST master effect slots, 4 KRYSTAL plugin shots, and ASIO low latency audio driver support. Some of the most common audio formats are supported: Ogg Vorbis, WAVE, FLAC and AIFF.

KRISTAL Audio Engine’s features are extended with the help of three plugins: KRISTAL Effects (multi delay, chorus, reverb and kristalizer), KRISTAL LiveIN (it enables you to connect your microphone or guitar and play through KRISTAL while using VST effects in realtime), and KRISTAL Waver. KRISTAL Waver is the sequencer plugin for KRISTAL, offering ASIO input monitoring, multichannel hard disk recording via ASIO/MME, audio clip arrangement, unlimited undo/redo, AES31 export and audio clip fade in, fade out, and crossfade.

KRISTAL Audio Engine may not be the most comprehensive application of its kind, but on the other hand its work platform is more than sufficient for average users who want to get familiar with audio recording and mixing.
Reviews & Comments
KRISTAL Audio Engine 1.0.1
Mike
on 25 May 2010
For freeware, this is very very good. I used to use ACID Express (also free). ACID allows beat matching between all of the looped samples, so there's no tweaking to do. Kristal Audio Engine doesn't do this. However, Kristal includes effects and the capability to import other effects. ACID makes you pay for that function. The Kristal Audio Engine software is so easy to use that I didn't have to read the documentation to figure out how to use it. Of course this is probably due to my familiarity with the ACID products, and both ACID and Kristal Audio Engine are similar in many ways. Essentially, you can either import samples (drums, synth, etc.) and "loop" them in the editor. I plugged a guitar into an amp simulator (SansAmp GT-2) straight into the mic input of my laptop. The resulting mix sounds very good. The only problem is a latency issue, but this won't be an issue if you have an ASIO sound card, or if you install an ASIO driver for your existing sound card. You can find the driver online for free.

If you're looking for a cheap way to get into home recording (and free is quite cheap), Kristal Audio Engine should do the trick.
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