If you make your living as an audio professional, you understand that staying afloat requires a flexible approach to the business. Having a specialty is great, but if you study the workflow of the top audio post houses in the country, you'll find that the owners are constantly looking for ways to expand the roster of services they offer.

For example, you can be certain that clients will be more likely to seek you out and keep coming back if they know you can fix any audio-related problems they have. Once your clients understand that you can edit and pre-master a CD as well as track a voiceover or layback a stereo music bed to video, your chances of thriving in the audio business will increase dramatically.

This month I'll review Bias Peak Pro 5, a powerful audio application that functions as the hub of a bundle of Bias applications that can help you provide a wide range of audio services. (This review will focus on Peak Pro 5. For more about the applications that can be bundled with Peak, visit the Bias web site at bias-inc.com.)

Peak has been the flagship application of Bias for the decade or so the company has been in existence. A stereo audio editor, Peak has always been known for its excellent sonic quality and intelligent design. For example, the app offered sophisticated batch-processing capabilities long before other companies figured out a way to integrate this time-saving feature. Although Bias is now building cross-platform software applications, Peak 5 remains strictly a Mac product.

The Peak workflow goes something like this: You record into one or more documents (mono or stereo), edit your material, and create a playlist in which you can rearrange them into a seamless whole. Great. But how does this process apply to you?

Let's say you simply need to record some voiceover to picture. You'll create a mono document, import and sync to a QuickTime movie file, track talent, and burn a CD or DVD of the session. And you're done.

But wait. Two weeks later, your client calls to say the video has been recut and she needs you to resynch the existing voiceover. No problem. You import the new QuickTime file, drop markers into your mono document that match the places where your voiceover now needs to be, and then type in the SMPTE locations that will allow you to end up with a properly synched track. Good work, but you could have handled this operation within Final Cut Pro. Where does Peak excel as an audio editor?

Here's another real-world scenario: A corporate video has been cut to a music library track that you own and have the rights to use professionally. However, this three-minute piece has been expanded to 3:42. You have to start cutting and expanding this track, and Peak 5 can help you.

Peak 3 was the last version I played with prior to Peak 5. Peak 3 required that you pay close attention when editing, and only rarely could you execute a cut without manually crossfading between the two new regions. Peak 5 has a default setting that could literally save you hundreds of hours a year.

Just to make sure you haven't turned it off, under the Options menu, make sure that Auto Snap is on. Then go to the Action menu and confirm that Snap to Zero Crossings is active. Peak 5 automatically finds the closest zero crossing point every time you cut audio, and the results are pure magic. Zero crossing ensures that no clicks or pops are introduced, and Peak 5 does the trick perfectly. It's almost worth the price of admission by itself. You can also toggle on the Blending feature, which by default creates a 100ms crossfade around your edit. However, given the effectiveness of the procedure I just described, I'm not sure you'll ever need it.

OK, back to your altered project. Remember how nicely you cut together two different library tracks at the 1:44 mark to match picture? And that your client used a verse and chorus of the second piece before you reintroduced the first track? Those 52” are now 57 seconds and 12 frames long. No problem. Under the DSP menu, select the Change Duration option and highlight the area. Peak 5 confirms the length, and you respond by typing in the change you want the program to perform. Voila! This portion of your track is now 57 seconds and 12 frames long, and the material on the right has been pushed back to accommodate it. I didn't challenge Change Duration to the point of distortion, but I'd certainly be comfortable altering an audio file up to 10 percent or so before worrying about introducing unwanted artifacts.

I'd love to spend another 10,000 words describing all of the features I discovered in Peak 5, but my editors have decided that devoting this entire issue to one review would be problematic, so let me just point out a few of the program's highlights. The number of Bias plug-ins that you'll own will vary, depending on which version of Peak 5 you purchase, but all of them are extremely well crafted and useful. In this version, Peak also lets you use any Audio Units plug-ins you may have on your Mac, in addition to the VST plug-ins earlier versions have supported.

The equalizers are all highly accurate and useful. (Freq-4 ships with all versions; the various SuperFreq multi-band EQs are part of the deluxe package.) If you're looking for a software equalizer that tries to emulate the warm coloration of a vintage Neve hardware EQ, you won't find it here. But that's OK. Well-tailored software EQs specialize in surgical accuracy, and Bias gets high marks for this package. The same can be said for the Sqweez compressor/limiter line of plug-ins.

Of course, if, like many audio post engineers, you also offer your services as a recording engineer for CD projects, you'll get even deeper into Peak 5. Last year, I received a commission from the Palisades Virtuosi, a piano/flute/clarinet trio that has a multi-record recording contract with Albany Records. The group premiered the piece Not a Sonata in October, and the live performance was recorded to hard drive and delivered to me on DVD-Audio in good shape.

Using Peak 5, I was able to experiment with the arrangement by cutting and pasting various sections, and manipulate the audio in a variety of ways. For example, the first movement, “Merci, Monsieur P.,” begins with a short piano phrase, and then four bars of piano chording before the flute enters. But Ron Levy, the pianist, was playing a bit too fast, and Margaret, the flute player, had to pull him down to the proper tempo. To fix the problem, all I had to do was isolate the four bars in question and, using the Change Duration function, slow them down by about 8 percent. Easy! (If you're interested in the results, please visit garyeskow.com and go to the Demo Room, where the entire piece is posted).

Once you start playing around with Peak 5, you'll discover the advantages of Vbox, the artful component of the program that lets you create a matrix (serial or parallel) of plug-ins as large as 99×99 to further process your sounds.

My only real complaint with Peak 5 is a basic one. There should be a Preferences option that lets the user tell the program to return to the last starting point when the transport is stopped during playback. It's not there! The get-around — hitting the return key during playback — is not the solution.

Additionally, you should be able to highlight a section and press Start to begin playback of it, but you can't. Again, with a few additional keystrokes, Peak 5 will get you there. But when you're doing detail work on an audio clip, you want the quickest workflow possible.

Other than these criticisms, Peak 5 deserves extremely high marks, even when running on a quickly aging G4, 770HMHz machine like mine. Finally, in this day and age Bias deserves praise for continuing to ship well-written hard copy manuals with its products.

Bias Pro Peak 5 is available as a standalone product; with Bias Deck 3.5; or as part of the Peak Pro XT 5 bundle, which also includes Deck 3.5, Master Perfection Suite, SoundSoap 2, and SoundSoap Pro 1. For more on SoundSoap Pro, see the review below.