Editorial Review:

Item Description:
MODEL- 21000266 VENDOR- PINNACLE SYSTEMS FEATURES- Pinnacle Clean Plus 4.0 Includes a USB Phono Preamp - with its sound quality being highly superior to many amplifiers - you can create lossless copies of LPs on your PC. Pinnacle CLEAN uses todays top audio restoration technologies to scour your recordings and deliver results as crystal clear as the original recordings. The perfect digital tool for archiving and preserving your old vinyl LPs, Pinnacle CLEAN will allow you to record your favorite albums, and then automatically remove the artifacts of age. Technical Highlights - Removes clicks, pops and background noise from any recording - Fully automatic process for great results, quickly and easily - Unique processing presets for LPs, tape and MP3 based music - Includes CD burning software for easy cataloging on disc - Complete parameter control over restoration process - Powered by Steinberg -- the professional Pro Audio experts - Supports VST (Virtual Studio Technology) Plug-ins - Includes top-quality USB phono preamp plus connection cables * Your Music In Its Purest Form. Hiss. Crackle. Scratches. Pops. These are the enemy. Pinnacle CLEAN uses todays top audio restoration technologies to scour your recordings and deliver results as crystal clear as the original recordings. * Out with the Old, in with Digital Audio. The perfect digital tool for archiving and preserving your old vinyl LPs, cassettes, and analogue media, Pinnacle CLEAN will allow you to

Amazon.com Item Description:
Be it LP, cassette, CD or MP3, Clean gets rid of hiss and crackle. Its high-quality effects and advanced music processing features give you perfect sounding music. You can let Clean do the work for you by automating this process. New professional tools and the intuitive handling make it easy to restore your music, to optimize the sound, and to burn the result onto CD.

The program delivers studio quality audio restoration from Steinberg, the leader in PC-based audio technology. Software includes a high-quality phonograph preamp to make recording your LPs easier than ever. Clean Plus allows you to have as much control over the process as you like--from full automation through complete control over every option.

Other tools include Wavelab Lite 2.5 for ultra-quick music editing, real-time crossfades and mastering effects, IntelliAssistant for fully-automatic handling, and TubeSimulation, which acts as a hi-fi amplifier simulator.

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Rating: - * Beware!!!! Clean can't find your burner. ... I bought Clean 4.0 and 4.1 and they have the same problem. When loading this software, Clean is supposed to find and configure your disc drives for reading and for burning. It usually always finds the ROM drive but finding the burner is a different story. Unlike it's sister software (included) Wave Lab Lite which enables you to choose whichever burner you wish, Clean might or might not find your burner. If it does find it, you're in business and it works flawlessly. Another problem is that Pinnacle nor Steinberg provide a download to correct this problem even though Clean has been out for a few years. How they could overlook this problem is beyond me. There is a Clean 5 (available in Europe only) but I am now afraid to invest any more money in this product. Until they print on the box that this problem has been corrected, BEWARE!!!. Rating: - * Incredibly poor product support ... I was never able to get the product to work. I tried the product support phone line. The phone line has the standard list of numeric choices... but doesn't let you enter a number midway through the list... you have to wait for the long list of products and choices to be read, even when you have called for the fourth time. The choices for this product lead to a dead end... the product is listed throught the first two levels of the menu, then disappears in the third level. The trail ends with no way to get to a human. The on-line listing of products supported does not list this product at the second level of menu, although it is in the first level. Rating: - * Meets all my expectations! ... I looked at the reviews for most of the major software for coping LPs and cleaning them and recording to CDs, including reading the reviews here. I was somewhat hesitant after reading the 1-star review on this program, but went ahead any ways. This program meets and in some cases exceeds my expectations! I got it yesterday and today recorded 4 of my albums onto CDs. It works very well and is fairly intuitive on how to use. I still have the occasional click or crack on the recorded CD, but overall I am very pleased with the results. So far I have only used the program to clean the recordings automatically, I'm sure if I play with the settings some I can probably eliminate the few remaining clicks and cracks. It's a little cumbersome to retrieve files that are removed from the play list and you want to use later, you need to save these as their own file right after they are recorded, otherwise, you have to hunt them down on your hard drive. The program works very quickly (I am using a Dell with a 2 GHz P4 processor, 512 MB SDRAM, and an SB Live 1024 Digital Sound Card), but make sure you have a lot of hard disk space, the 4 albums took 6 GB in .wav format. A few things that I learned along the way: 1) make sure your turntable is grounded, otherwise you might get a humming noise that the program will not clean up (or at least I have not figured out how to clean it up yet, but if the turntable is grounded, this is not an issue), and 2) in your sound card settings, make sure the Line In is not set to Mute. This is stated in the on-CD manual but not in the paper manual that comes with this program. Finally, I found that the price at Amazon was the cheapest around when you consider the free shipping. It arrived in 3 days. I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS PROGRAM FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO COPY LPs ONTO CD! Rating: - * UI is easy to learn ... I have tried numerous sound editor programs, such as Goldwave, CoolEdit Pro, Nero Wave Editor, and more. They all work well if you have the time to find each little click and pop and manually edit the noise. While the various filters do change the sound track or selections, I found that I didn't have the time to use these programs. I had been using my old Atari Falcon for A to D and editing, because of the simplicity of the software. Mr Steinberg, actually invented and patented much of the wave display and cursor control technology or User Interfaces that we enjoy in many of the sound editors on the market. This UI technology was available to the Atari community in the mid 1980's, then later to Mac users, and now to PC users. I think the Pinnacle/Steinberg Clean 4.0 software and the pre amp hardware is great. It is time to retire my Atari Falcon...Not! Rating: - * Insufferable UI ... I purchased Pinnacle Clean Plus after I tried Magix Audio Cleaning Lab. The cool hardware that came with Clean plus looked nice - and I figured the software should be very good too -based on Pinnacle's reputation for excellence. Well - a swing and a miss folks. The User Interface is insufferable! It is nearly impossible to even get the system to identify CD tracks - and absolutely impossible to make them accurate. While the quality of the remastering is good - the ability to actually make a good CD doesn't exist. I got a free copy of Magix Audio Cleanng Lab 3.0 at COMPUSA (After rebate) and didn't like it at first - but honestly now it Magix got it right while Pinnacle (Steinberg actually wrote the software)completely missed the boat. The Magix software does the remastering nearly as well - I believe Pinnacle has the edge here. BUt it's of absolutely no use if you can't identify and work with tracks accurately. Now - I use the Pinnacle hardware with the Magix software and can get the job done. I recommend you get a pre-amp for 35 bucks at Radio Shack - and get Magix Audio Cleaning Lab 3.0 - for now.