Music Editing with Audio Hijack or WireTap

Question

WireTap Pro vs. Audio Hijack with Fission for one simple editing task
I have a collection of about 500 pieces of classical music in iTunes and on my iPod and iPhone. Some recordings come with adequate fade-out or decay time at the end of each piece of music (or each movement), some with little or none. I would like to get into my iTunes library and extend the fade-out silence at the end of each piece to a time that better suits my ear -- adding perhaps 10-15 seconds before the next piece of music starts if I have the iPod set for "shuffle." I'm not wanting to edit sound out...I'm just wanting to extend or append a silence. Are either of these program well-suited to that task? Any glitches I should be aware of? If both can do what I need is there any reason to favor one or the other?

Answer 1

I use Fission for such tasks - I've never tried WireTap.
Audio Hijack is for recording internet streams or other sound coming through your computer. It's for making new recordings - you don't need it if all you're doing is the sound editing like you mention.
With Fission, you can fade a song out or in, and do some other sound editing, like splitting a piece into two. It's not for making real minute cuts or real fine tuning, but it works well for simple editing.
For adding silence, it's pretty straightforward - you move the playhead to the end of the track (in your case), and there's a menu item (under the 'clip' menu, I think, that's called "insert silence". Then a counter comes up and you can tell it how much silence you want, and it will add it at the playhead. It does it as a separate track, though, with a 'split' in between. So the next step is in the edit menu, 'remove all splits' (or you can do it manually).
Then you can save the file - if you 'replace' the old file with the new one, you're done, and the new file overwrites the old one. If you give the new track a different name, then you have to navigate to the folder it's in and double-click to import it into iTunes, where it will have the same name (in iTunes) as the old track, even if you saved it under a different name. You can change the metadata for the track before saving, to avoid that.
But I just add silence and then overwrite the old track, so it's gone from iTunes, and the new one is there.
It can be a little tedious to do several tracks (one at a time). No real glitches - sometimes when messing with a track too much, there can be a 'popping' sound added, but it's rare and easily fixed by undoing the editing. You have to undo it one step at a time, but you can undo it every step back to the beginning.
Also, Fission works on all types of sound files without transcoding - Apple Lossless, AIFF, mp3, AAC - it doesn't change the file format (unless you ask it to convert the file).
Maybe somebody will post about WireTap Pro - I assume it can do the same things, but I've never seen the interface.