Daniel James wrote on Tue, 22-Jul-2003:
Sweep has a
great interface, but it still has one significant
downside: all the audio is loaded into memory. This prevents
the effective editing of large soundfiles or sessions unless you
have a ton of memory (or it will swap all over you).
I wouldn't regard this as a downside - it's just a consequence of the
in-RAM design. Sweep and Audacity (which is a hard disk recorder)
complement each other very well.
You wouldn't use Audacity for real-time scratching effects, or
scrubbing through a file to find an edit point by ear. You wouldn't
use Sweep for recording four channels of 32-bit float audio for half
an hour or longer. But I've done these things with the other program,
with great sucess.
A killer feature of free software is that you don't have to choose a
single proprietary 'solution', which will usually be a design
compromise - you get to use both Sweep and Audacity, and many other
programs, depending on what you need at that moment.
This is a good point, I didn't really mean it as a deficiency, just
a usage caveat.
If Conrad does update it to stream from disk, he might
consider it an option in addition to the current practice (so no usage advantages
are compromised).
jlc