Liquid has accurate audio controls. It can mix up to 8 stereo audio tracks live. The clips have a level control on them, in a similar way to Adobe Premiere, which can be controlled either by adding and moving points or through the mixer control shown. You can record audio levels on the fly in a similar manner to Premiere - however one advantage of Liquid is that as it applies your audio level changes it does not add too many control points. With Premiere’s live mixing it will add so may control points that it becomes difficult to manually tweak them.

You can also record a voice over directly to the timeline - whilst speaking you will hear the sound already on timeline allowing you to synchronise.

Liquid’s waveform display is very accurate and also very quick to refresh. This is because when it captures a clip it makes a bitmap of the waveform which it then uses everytime it needs to display the sound, unlike Premiere and Avid Xpress DV. This means that you can work with the waveform display open and not suffer the consequences of slow update of the timeline.

You can open an audio clip in it’s own clip window to give a much more refined view of the clip. As you can see the lower display shows the entire waveform with the box showing the portion of the waveform in the upper display.

You can globally adjust the volume of the waveform here so the entire level of the clip is increased.  A nice touch is that as you do so the visual representation of the waveform is made larger - this makes it very easy to increase the volume on the clip to maximum without distorting it.

Liquid has 3 audio filters - Echo, equaliser and maximiser. This filters are high quality but a more would be useful. Premiere has more basic filters built-in as has Avid, and it is a shame that Liquid does not support Direct-X audio plug-ins either. Hopefully this will change as Pinnacle has now bought Steinberg - a company renowed for their good audio programs.