To continue showcasing what’s new in the next version BeatCleaver, here’s a peek our next big feature: Zoom!

Zoom, seriously? Why is that exciting? Why didn’t BeatCleaver have this before?

Zoom in BeatCleaver 1.2 is exciting because it’s slick, intuitive, and incredibly easy to use. We spent a lot of time carefully considering how to implement zoom because we think it’s the first place where the design of other wave editors starts to go wrong. To continue to make BeatCleaver easy to use, we wanted to take a different approach.

BeatCleaver’s waveform zoom is better because it’s completely fluid, “tool-less”, and frustration-free.

See for yourself:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo1NB3bBn_M?rel=0]

There’s no juggling between tools, holding modifier keys, or jarring “snapping” of the zoom. To zoom in BeatCleaver, just:

• scroll your mousewheel,
• do two-finger scrolling on Mac trackpads, 
• or grab the zoom bar at the bottom and drag up. 

(The two-finger scrolling works both horizontally to scroll and vertically to zoom in/out – it feels fantastic!)

So why didn’t BeatCleaver have zoom before?

Initially, our primary use case was slicing short WAV drum loops, for which zoom wasn’t essential. We also thought that MP3/M4A support was a more useful feature, and that zoom would make the most sense after BeatCleaver could handle bigger files. So for the next release of BeatCleaver, we’ve added all of that!

In the video above, you might also notice our revamped our file loading code, which renders files as we load them, so you never have to wait. Need to load a 20 minute long song to slice from? No problem. Want to slice up some cool sounds from your last epic jam session? Piece of cake.

As we touched on before, there’s now an overview waveform at the bottom which can be grabbed and dragged to control scrolling and zoom. We spent a lot of time tweaking the exact feel of this “zoombar”, and we think it beats the pants off everything else out there. When our new release is out, give it a shot and let us know what you think!

We’re now starting closed beta testing for this new version of BeatCleaver, and if that goes well, we should be nearing a release. But before that, we’ve got one more little feature to reveal here on the blog before we launch, so stay tuned!