A good audio editor is like the pocket knife in your audio production toolbox. It's something you'll return to time and time again. Why? Because you want to quickly slice up beats and load the individual sounds in a sampler. Maybe you want that bass drum on the first and third beat. Maybe you want to use a sample from that killer jazz record you discovered in the secondhand bin at your local record store. Youl'll need to cut that bit from that aiff-file somehow right? Audio editing in GarageBand isn't really up to scratch so you might need a dedicated tool for these tasks.
Fission by Rogue Amoeba is a basic but elegant audio editing application that may fit the bill. Fission allows you to losslessly (meaning without quality loss) edit MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF files.
It just saw a 1.5 release that adds numerous useful features for musicians and podcasters on a Mac. Among others:
- Full audio insertion support
- Copy and paste audio within a single file
- Combine audio from other files and between audio formats
- Increase and decrease gain of audio selections
Fission will set you back a very reasonable $32, and you can also get it in a bundle with the acclaimed Audio Hjack Pro for $50. Not a bad deal I reckon.