I have enlisted several individuals who are well versed in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Audition to put Aviary.com's rival applications to the test. The comments below will compare and contrast Aviary's Phoenix with Adobe Photoshop and Aviary's Myna with Adobe Audition.
Photo Editing: http://rookery9.aviary.com.s3.amazonaws.com/8209000/8209301_68d5_625x625.jpg
ReplyDeleteAviary's Phoenix is a nice online program for folks who want to do basic photo editing. Its tools palette is very similar to that of PhotoShop as is many of its menu features. However, for someone looking to do more advanced techniques, the program is limited.
The photo I edited consisted of separating it into two layers, utilizing the magnetic lasso tool and applying a mask. Additionally, I added a blur effect to the background layer and removed its saturation. These steps were pretty intuitive in the program.
However, I did run into difficulty trying to work with layer styles, particularly hue blending. There are no apparent features to support some of these techniques and many of the common effects found in PhotoShop are not included in Phoenix. I would imagine this to be frustrating to seasoned editors who are seeking to perform more advanced tasks.
While I find Phoenix to be a user-friendly program, I feel it's geared more towards novice photographers and editors who are doing this as a hobby. It's "PhotoShop Lite", so to speak.
I decided to experiment with Myna and compare it to Audition. However, my laptop is virtually incapable of working with this program online, due to it's poor excuse of an existence. Anyway, I did manage to cut a quick piece together and think I can safely report my findings despite not completing my "project" in it's entirety.
ReplyDeleteMyna first appears to me as a closer image of an early version of Protools, rather than Audition, at least based soely on looks. It uses colors, which is something Audition hasn't caught on to yet (possibly to keep itself immediately distinguishable from it's competition). Well that's just looks anyway. It operates I suppose closely to Audition's multitrack mode but lacks an up-close edit mode as Audition has. As far as it's effects go, it has no where near the amount of effects as well as control in applying the effects as Adobe seems to offer. The selection tool doesn't offer a quick fade option either, as you can find in Audition 3.0.
Can you make a quality audio piece using Myna? Yes...I guess. Is it as nice as Adobe Audition? No way, not a chance. I'm not saying that it's bad, and the price is nice, but for Aviary to even think that they have an equivalent program as Audition is amusing. It reminds me more of other free software such as Audacity, which like Myna is cool for free. Using this software in place of Audition to complete assignments like the ones I had in MCCC's radio program gives me a bad taste in mouth just thinking about it. It would take a lot of getting used to and sacrificing for me to make this primary audio editing software. I'll stick with Audition!
Here's the content I put together in Myna.
ReplyDelete[audio]https://s3.amazonaws.com:443/rookery/8225000/8225052_65f4.mp3[/audio] [url=http://www.aviary.com/artists/Dramatdude/creations/creeper_chaos]Creeper Chaos.egg[/url]
As Josh said, it's a neat tool, but nowhere near as sophisticated as Audition. I found I was missing the dedicated edit view, the "snap to" functionality of Audition's Multitrack mode, and a plethora of effects. I was able to build a fairly simple track using Myna's connected library of tracks, which was awesome. The availability of so many loops and samples, for free, was something that caught me pleasantly by surprise. But again, trying to change up the effects on each track was very limited. Audition has dozens of effects, each with a great selection of preloaded presets, while Myna had only a handful of effects, which were only manually tweakable. It was also difficult to line up all the different pieces I was using, and the lack of "snap-to" functionality got frustrating the longer I worked. There is actually a very tiny silent spot in my work that is the result of this difficulty. I finally gave up trying to match up the tracks.
Now, Myna's merits. Firstly, it's free. Secondly, it's free. Did I mention it's free? I could see this being a great tool for teaching or doing assignment's in radio/audio classes. Instead of the "poor college student" spending hundreds of dollars on Audition, or even only a hundred dollars with a student discount, they could use Myna when away from their lab computer. Perhaps a short homework assignment composed entirely in Myna. Also, I would not be surprised to see Myna create the ability to export work to the Audition format, much in the same way the open source office suite, "Open Office", allows users to export files to the popular Microsoft formats. I can definitely see the potential of Myna if used as a supplement to Audition, but certainly not as a replacement.
Edit: I tried to post an actual embedded player, but Blogspot wouldn't let me -_-