When science and creativity collide, the results are invariably interesting. Let’s see if this long-running audio dissection editor can make sparks

PC MAC

In the decade since Hit’n’Mix’s audio software first appeared, it has come on leaps and bounds and not only grown in terms of features but also sounds a whole lot better. Somewhere along the way it acquired the Infinity name and now, at version 4.7, could finally be ready for a much wider audience.

Basic concepts

Billed as the world’s first atomic audio editor, Infinity is a standalone application (OS X 10.10 or later, Windows 7 or later) that analyses audio (WAV, mp3, Flac, Ogg) and presents it as melodic and noise components. These can be edited in various ways to achieve functional, reparation and creative tasks. Melodic and noise components appear in a typical timeline workspace with pitch/frequency on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. Infinity uses a layers-based workflow, and once it’s finished analysing an audio file, presents what it calls a ‘Rip’ as two noise elements, Unpitched (Low) and Unpitched (High), and as many melodic Layers as it sees fit. You’ll find these listed in the fold-out Layers panel on the right hand side, and this includes other layer-specific functionality such as mute, solo, note lock, playback level, rename, delete and duplicate as well as various visual options such as colour and width. You can edit notes directly in the workspace and apply a number of real-time changes including volume and pitch correction via the dropdown Effects menu. Further destructive processing is accessed via the RipScripts menu. Finally, there’s also a Sound Palette feature to draw notes from scratch.