Gear/Software
Triumph – app review
Triumph is a very powerful, very complex, yet surprisingly well-organized app for Mac that provides a plethora of tools for audio editing and mastering. While it’s true that it would take the average user a significant amount of time to fully understand what this app is really capable of, the good people at Audiofile have made this process more accessible by creating a logical, navigable interface that’s designed to be as self-explanatory and clutter-free as possible. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t be a challenge for people to get the hang of – because it will. But it’s worth the time and effort, because it’s apparent that once you’re really familiar with its functions, it can be a valuable addition to your audio toolkit.
There are so many features to this software that it would be difficult to talk about all of them in one article; not without the article turning into a full-blown essay, at least. One of the main things to point out is that this isn’t an app for music production. It’s not for making beats or doing any kind of sequencing. This is strictly for loading in audio you’ve already recorded or rendered, and for editing that audio and enhancing it with powerful effects and plugins. And as a program with that specific aim, Triumph certainly delivers the goods.
Audiofile teamed up with big-name company Izotope to bring you cutting edge repair tools that include their acclaimed Declick, Denoise and Dehum filters. It also comes with Audio Units plugins, which feature standard effects like delay and reverb, as well as equalizers and a multiband compressor. The sound quality of the program is boosted by Audiofile’s own FHX processor, which gives playback a high-definition, natural-sounding improvement, helping you hear the clearest possible resolution of your mixes. Whether it’s music, an interview or a podcast you’re editing, you’ll find everything you need to greatly improve your recordings.
Another feature that stands out is that certain actions work with AppleScript (there are 200 of them in all), meaning you can save yourself a lot of time by using the templates included in the software, download scripts made from others, or even create your own. If you have several audio files you want to apply the same effects with the same parameters on, and don’t want to go through the hassle of doing each instance manually, this will help you breeze through. You can also create color-coded labels that can be placed at trim locations, specific peaks, clip events and more, which makes access to specific points in your recordings a lot quicker.
Within a project, you are able to organize your individual tracks as layers, and you can either situate them next to or on top of each other, depending on how you want to work with them. By placing them on top of each other you can make different combinations of sounds and apply effects to each layer – so for example, if you have drum loops that you’ve sequenced in separate tracks, you can apply effects individually to the snare, kick, or whatever else, giving you all kinds of high-quality tools to generate some really interesting sounds. You can solo a layer by holding the option key and clicking the check box on the left of the layer’s name, to be able to work on each layer at a time and tweak them to get the best results. You can even modulate the different layers together to make hybrid creations, which is great for combining things like synth leads in order to make some interesting new textures.
Overall I think Triumph is a powerful app that professionals and amateurs alike will both appreciate, but it does have a steep learning curve, and as such can become somewhat confusing. To remedy that, however, they have been uploading some informative little tutorial videos to their YouTube channel that can help you figure out how to quickly navigate the program and get better acquainted with the interface. Triumph comes equipped with audio editing tools that plenty of people will find useful, but many of its functions will require a lot of time and dedication to learn how to use properly. This may put some people off after using it for a while, but if you’re ready to devote that type of energy to a program that will improve the way you work with editing and mastering, this is surely an app worth looking into.