Great app, but not for my podcast editing needs – Ferrite Recording Studio Review

Ferrite is quite an achievement, but it doesn’t entirely meet my needs for podcast editing. I come from using Audacity on Mac, which isn’t exactly a joy to use, but will have to continue to be my audio editor for podcasts. As an amateur podcast creator noise reduction is particularly important to me since I don’t record in a soundproof studio on top-of-the-line equipment. For starters I find putting auto leveling, noise reduction, and boost into a “preproduction” phase to be strange and annoying. I don’t know why it’s not just an effect you can apply on a track like everything else, which would make it easier to toggle on/off and experiment with. But worse for me, the noise reduction is so aggressive it cuts out some of the spoken audio (even with boost enabled) and leaves the rest sounding distorted. Maybe I’m not recording with enough gain or my guests speak too softly, but the software should be able to deal with it. Again my only comparison is Audacity, which has a feature that allows the user to sample some silent audio to create a noise profile that can be removed from all of the track. Ferrite’s fully-automated approach is easier to apply, but much less useful for my needs. Garage Band supports using my Zoom H6 as a USB audio device and thus can record each of the 4 microphones I have attached to it onto separate tracks right to the iPad. Assuming iOS allows that capability to third-party developers, that would be an amazing addition to Ferrite that would let me overcome annoying import issues from iOS’ limitations on external storage. Right now it’s Zoom’s SD card to Mac to iCloud Drive/Dropbox to Ferrite. But again, that’s an iOS issue, not a Ferrite issue. On the plus side, most of my workflow involves deleting things across all tracks, and Ferrite has clever gestures for that: swipe with two fingers left to right to select across tracks and create clips (that you can move or delete or whatever). But swipe in the other direction (right to left) and the selection is immediately deleted. You don’t have mouse-like precision without a cursor, but it’s still a huge timesaver. My only complaint there is that sometimes it takes a couple tries for the two-finger swipe gesture to register. In general the touch-based editing in Ferrite is powerful and the speed of the iPad Pro makes it faster for me to edit with Ferrite than my MacBook. Easy chapter-marking is a joy. But being unable to tune noise reduction means it can’t quite replace Audacity for me yet. I may yet play around with one pass through Audacity and refined editing with Ferrite.
Review by Soybean on Ferrite Recording Studio.