Sweep is an audio editor and live playback tool.
It supports many music and voice formats including WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and MP3, with multichannel editing and LADSPA effects plugins.
Sweep operates on various 8/16/24/32 bit PCM files. Other major formats handled are GSM 6.10, G721, G723, NIST Sphere and DWVW.
Sweep contains filters and effects you can apply to sound. One of its best features is “scrubbing”. The scrub tool provides immediate audio feedback when jumping to specific portions of a file. This is something you will appreciate if you are a DJ.
Sweep also allows discontinuous selections, multiple views of a sound sample and piano-style playback. Sweep has full support for multi-channel files and for multiple levels of undo and redo.
Sweep is designed to be intuitive and to give you full control.
Key Features
- Extremely easy to use:
- Unlimited undo/redo with a fully revertible edit history.
- Multithreaded background rendering and file import/export: effects processing is not disabled during playback, providing instantaneous feedback.
- Precise, interactive scrubbing.
- Multichannel file support: Sweep provides complete editing and processing for multichannel sound files.
- Customisable keybindings available for all operations.
- Translations for French, Hungarian, Italian, German, Russian and Polish.
- Support for many PCM and voice file formats via libsndfile:
- At least 14 PCM sound file formats formats including WAV, W64, AIFF/AIFF-C, IFF/SVX, AU and raw PCM files.
- PCM audio encoding formats including 8/16/24/32 bit PCM, 32 and 64 bit floating point, u-law, A-law and ADPCM.
- Voice encoding formats including GSM 6.10, G721/G723 ADPCM, 12/16/24 bit DWVW.
- Support for Ogg Vorbis format audio files.
- Support for Speex files.
- Support for LADSPA effects plugins, including:
- The Computer Music Toolkit by Richard Furse, containing high and low pass filters, compressors, delays, and a port of the popular Freeverb reverb unit.
- SWH plugins, over 30 effects plugins by Steve Harris, including overdrives, comb filter, ring modulator, pitch scaler, chorus, flanger and various distortions.
- Powerful editing operations:
- Cut, copy and paste insert: conventional cut or copy selected regions of a sound, and paste into the same or other sounds.
- Discontinuous selections: select multiple regions of a sound and operate on these regions simultaneously.
- Interactive moving and merging of selection boundaries.
- Selection invert, selection double/halve and selection shift left/right.
- Intuitive visualisation:
- Multiple views per clip
- Variable zooming to below 1:1 with mouse wheel support
- View Center, Zoom to Selection, Zoom Normal
- Easy differentiation of multiple files with 6 standard colour schemes including Decoder Red, Orangeboom, Coogee Bay Blue and Blackwattle
- Versatile playback modes:
- Standard transport features: play/pause, stop, rewind, fast forward, scan reverse/forward, go to end/beginning.
- Simultaneous playback of multiple files.
- Play all, play selection, and looping playback.
- Interactive reverse playback: includes reverse previews and reverse looping.
- Flexible recording:
- Independent record and playback heads.
- “Tape loop” style recording.
- Reverse recording.
- Device handling and portability:
- Support for Open Sound System compatible audio devices (eg. stock Linux kernel), ALSA 0.6.0 and Solaris audio.
- Intuitive control of application latency.
- Support for both little and big endian CPU architectures.
- Live playback “DJ” features:
- Two-handed interactive scrubbing.
- Independent gain levels per file.
- +/-10% pitch slider.
- Piano-style sample playback.
Website: www.metadecks.org/software/sweep
Support: Tutorials
Developer: Conrad Parker and contributors
License: GNU General Public License

Sweep is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Audio Editors | |
|---|---|
| Audacity | Multi-track audio editor and recorder |
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| LosslessCut | Swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing |
| Tenacity | Cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder; fork of Audacity |
| Auto-Editor | Automatically edit video and audio |
| audapolis | Editor for spoken-word media with transcription |
| Kwave | Sound editor built on the KDE Frameworks 5 |
| Cecilia | Audio signal processing environment aimed at sound designers |
| GWC | Gnome Wave Cleaner |
| Snd | An advanced sound editor modeled loosely after Emacs |
| Reco | Audio recording app designed for elementary OS |
| pxtone collab | Sample-based music editor |
| Sound Recorder | Straightforward way to record and play audio with simple interface |
| mp3splt | Command-line tool to split mp3, ogg vorbis and FLAC files without decoding |
| WaveSurfer | Tool for sound visualization and manipulation |
| Sweep | Audio editor and live playback tool |
| mhWaveEdit | Simple and fast sound editor |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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