iPad & iPhone Music App Review: Hokusai Audio Editor

APP NAME: Hokusai Audio Editor
VERSION: 1.0
APP DEVELOPER: Wooji Juice
PRICE: FREE
PLATFORM: iPad, iPhone, or iPod
TYPE OF MUSIC APP: Audio Editor

Overview:
Hokusai is an iOS audio editor that lets you manipulate audio in a variety of ways that will move easily into your work flow.

What can it do?
Upon first entering Hokusai Audio Editor, you encounter the project browser, which allows you to create and manage your various files. Your previously created files are presented with some useful information, including the date that they were created, the size, the number of tracks, and the length. For the audio obsessive musician that likes to draw upon sounds from a variety of sources, this attention to detail in the library makes the sound catalog much more useful. If you want to work with one of your older files, simply press it and you’ll be good to go. When you’re ready to create a new file, press the arrow button in the upper right hand corner of the screen and you’ll be presented with an “Add New Track” option. If you’ve got a wealth of audio on your computer, you can use iTunes sharing to store it in Hokusai and then press the “Import” button to open it. Keeping audio clips on Dropbox makes it accessible most places, including Hokusai – just press the “Dropbox” button to pull your audio into your project. The “Create” button lets you bring in raw electronic sound – either a stream of white noise or a synthesized pitch. You’ve got options to change the length or either format, as well as determine which pitch or sound wave you’d like to utilize. Many projects will start with an original piece of sound – something that you can do with the “Record” button. Press the microphone icon and you can use the internal mic or an external mic to quickly capture sound, which bounces right onto a track. It’s easy to jump right into a new project or begin work with an old file without even skipping a beat.

Once you’ve created a project, you move to the main editing window, where you can easily start with some basic editing on your tracks. You’ll see the wave form in a track format, with a “mono” or “stereo” reading on the left as well as the track name. You’ve also got some options to rename the track or convert it to stereo. The play button is in the upper right hand corner of the screen for a review of the whole project. When you’re ready to edit the file, press your finger on a chosen spot and once a marker pops up on the screen drag your finger. As you drag, you’ll hear the audio that you’re selecting and a blue highlight provide a visual on the selected area. Once you’ve found your piece of audio, you can cut it out of the track or copy it for later pasting; you also have the option of deleting it altogether. When you delete a piece of audio, Hokusai will eliminated the selected piece and pull either side of the recording together in its place. Choosing the “Trim” option chops out the selected audio and everything following it. If you’re having trouble selecting the audio because you just can’t see it clearly, don’t fret – a quick pinch of the waveform lets you zoom into specific points in the waveform. The folks at Wooji Juice fortunately included “Undo” and “Redo” buttons in the upper left hand corner of the screen, which make the experimentation and quick opinion changes an important part of the work flow. The ease of the touch interface, along with the thoughtful features in the app, make editing audio quick and easy in Hokusai

Once you’ve chopped your audio into a workable piece of sound, you can alter it with a number of effects. Just select a piece of audio that you’d like to work with and then tap it – you’ll see the familiar option bar, but this time, choose the “More” option. You’re automatically presented with a choice 7 effects, audio generation, a noise gate, and the choice to reverse the audio. The effects are practical and powerful, letting you do a variety of things to the audio. “Fade In” or “Fade Out” let you add a rise or fall in sound, a beautiful feature that is sadly missing in too many iOS DAWs; since you’ve got it here, simply import your song and add the fade. If you didn’t get enough audio on your recording, easily raise the “Gain” or simply “Normalise” the track to its highest possible volume. Maybe you got too much sound – you can use the “Peak Limiter” to cut off the rough edges or insert some “Silence” at an appropriate point. The “Vocal Levels Smoother” is a nice feature that lets you even out spoken word, a tool that will be especially useful for podcast creation. The audio generation options allow you to insert white noise of synthesized sounds into your track instead of popping them into a completely new track. The “Noise Gate” is fully featured with options for sound cut off, the strength of the gate, and the harshness of the cut. “Reverse” is always a fun effect that can turn any sound upside down and repurpose your material into magical new sounds. There’s a lot that you can do with effects in Hokusai – just load your sound, kick your creativity into high gear, and explore the possibilities.

Hokusai makes saving and exporting your work convenient and painless, adding to the app’s value. When you’ve finished editing individual tracks, you can mix them into a single stereo track through the “Mix Down Tracks” option accessed through the button in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Before the export, Hokusai fortunately gives you the option to choose which tracks get mixed; if you’re working with a large number of tracks, you can slim that number by mixing two or three tracks into one. Once you’ve set export options, you can also do a “Quick Export” from within the project, letting you immediately turn your project into your most frequently used type of file. You can access more export options by returning to the project browser and selecting the file of your choice. Simply tap the project to select it and press the import button near the bottom of the screen. A window pops up with choices around the file format for your export, the quality of the file, and what to do with the file after you’ve created it. You have two file format choices; you can create a wave file or mpeg-4 file from your export. The quality of your file can be set to low, medium, or high, with file size reflecting your choice. Once your file has been created, you can send it directly to your Dropbox, making it available for immediate sharing, or your can send it to another app directly on your iPad. If you don’t want to do anything with it, your file can simply sit in Hokusai. Your options are straight-ahead and practical for export, making your work on Hokusai practical for applications outside the app.

 Experience Level (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced)
The ease of Hokusai’s interface and intuitive nature certainly makes it accessible to beginners, but it seems that intermediate and advanced users would find more uses for it. There’s no doubt that just about anybody could open up Hokusai, record some audio, and chop it up in the best word processor type fashion. Hokusai is not a typical song creation app though; the real power and potential of the app might be lost on a beginner. Singer-songwriters could find some nice uses for Hokusai either to collect ideas or create recordings of their performances. The intermediate or advanced user would be immediately seeing the potential for creating samples that could be used in other apps. A musician experienced with sound manipulation could certainly put together an original song in Hokusai – that strong potential exists. There’s so many possibilities inherent in Hokusai, you’ve just got to know how to use them. The bottom line though is that this is an immensely powerful free audio editor; anybody, from beginner to advanced musician, should include it in their iOS music making arsenal.

Sound Quality
The potential quality of sound on Hokusai is outstanding; it’s just important to remember that this is an audio editor and your results are based upon your work. The product that you export will sound fantastic in terms of quality and you should feel comfortable with its integration into another project. Make sure that you take the proper steps to get the type of sound that you want though. If you’re looking for a pristine recording, use a high quality mic, think about microphone placement, and make sure that your environment will give you the sound that you need. When you bring in sounds from another app, get the sounds that you need without a lot of extra clutter. If you want a grainy, dirty sound, find an older mic and surround yourself with that audio grime. Hokusai will let you turn your sounds upside down and export them as a high quality sound file, just remember that you’re responsible for the file’s contents.

What’s It Missing?
It’s hard to complain about Hokusai – it offers an awful lot for a free app; still, there are a few things that I would like to see integrated into the app. When working with multiple tracks, it would be nice to have options for solo/mute. Once you’ve layered more than one track, you can only hear them played back together – it would great to stack things up and then dig into some individual editing on tracks. Some basic mixer functions or even a separate mixer view would be helpful when dealing with multiple tracks. Hokusai is certainly not a DAW, but some little things like the ability to pan tracks and set levels before mixing them down would be useful. An internal metronome night be nice for live musicians trying to create layered parts. It would be just as easy to run a drum machine app in the background, but this would be a simple feature that would make the app more useful. When iCloud enters into the iOS world this fall, it would be nice to see integration for importing and exporting audio through Apple’s cloud. These are a few wish list ideas, but again, Hokusai goes over the top in offering amazing value with a strong app at no cost.

Final Thoughts
Hokusai Audio Editor is a smartly conceived app, made to serve the audio professional and the creative iOS musician in a very real way. The programmers at Wooji Juice really considered the needs of a musician editing audio and found a way to lay them out in a applicable way. The beauty of audio editing on Hokusai lies in the way that you interact with audio inside the app. Hokusai will convince you that audio was meant to be edited with a touch screen – it’s just so natural within this app that you’ll find yourself consistently coming back to it. There are some nice extras that you can buy through in-app purchases that serve to enhance Hokusai’s usefulness; I quickly snapped up the ability to use Audiocopy and Audiopaste within the app. In reality though, there’s a heck of a lot that you can do simply through the tools provided in the free version. The ease and flow that comes with editing audio inside Hokusai will convince you to integrate more audio into your projects and inspire you to hunt through your environment for interesting sounds. It’s a powerhouse app with a beautiful interface . . . and it’s free – with these factors behind it, it would be a crime for any musician to not have Hokusai Audio Editor on their iPad or iPhone.