Sound Forge Pro supports full-resolution 24-bit audio to capture the subtle nuances of sound, with 32-bit / 64-bit float 192 kHz files, and recording from 24-bit hardware.Īnd it fully supports working with multichannel audio, including editing down to the sample level.įor working with Vegas or other video editors, Sound Forge Pro supports editing audio with video, importing common video formats, playing audio in sync with video, and exporting with video rendering options.
A trial download is available to experience Sound Forge Pro for yourself. The product also includes Sony Noise Reduction 2 for restoring damaged clips, Sony CD Architect 5.2 for professional Red Book Audio CD mastering, and the iZotope Mastering Effects Bundle 2 plug-ins. Sound Forge Pro 10 is available for around $375. Sony also has integrated disc-at-once CD burning into Sound Forge Pro to directly generate Red Book audio premasters for professional replication. It expands editing with event-based editing to work on blocks in a single window, support for musical instrument files, and extensive additional tools and effects. The new version 10 enhances the interface with a more customizable workspace combining floating, dockable, and tabbed windows, and adds interactive tutorials to help get started with editing tasks.
Sony Sound Forge Pro 10, released in September 2009, continues this legacy as a professional digital audio production suite, including audio recording, editing, processing, and mastering audio files – plus sound design, audio restoration, and CD creation for professional replication. Instead of a collection of tools combined into an integrated suite, Sony has a small family of professional products that run on Windows, featuring Vegas Pro for video, plus two powerful audio tools that are suites in their own right: Sound Forge Pro for audio editing and mastering, and ACID Pro for music creation. And Apple, with its Final Cut Studio expanding from professional editing to digital cinema.Īnd then there’s Sony Creative Software, with a legacy based in audio from the acquisition of Sonic Foundry back in 2003. Or Adobe, with its ever-more-tightly integrated Creative Suite, from imaging to video to the web.
In that context and at that price, Sound Forge Audio Studio makes a lot of sense.What family of video editing tools are you most comfortable with? There’s Avid, with its extensive legacy in broadcast and film.
If you’re also shopping for some video-editing software, consider Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 Production Suite, which bundles the consumer versions of Vegas and Sound Forge and costs £69 from Amazon. Expect the price to fall when boxed copies arrive the UK, though. We don’t expect the same quality of effects as offered in Sound Forge Pro, but something approaching it would be welcome.Īt £45, it’s a tad expensive for what is ultimately a supporting application, and a pared down one at that (the full-fat Sound Forge Pro 10 is much more powerful but costs £309 ex VAT).
Other frustrations are the inability to chain effects and the lack of high quality mastering effects for sprucing up finished mixes – a task the software is otherwise perfect for. It seems daft having to import a file into Vegas or Acid in order to change the pitch or tempo, and then export it back out again, but the difference in quality means it’s an inconvenience worth bearing.
Sound Forge Pro 10’s improved time-stretch and pitch-shift algorithm, Elastique Pro, hasn’t made it over to this cut-price version, even though it is included in the consumer-oriented Studio versions of Vegas and Acid. It’s prone to digital distortion, and the linear rather than logarithmic frequency control makes it difficult to fine-tune settings. This same effect failed to impress us when we met it in Sound Forge Pro 10. The only new feature that’s not a workflow improvement is the Resonant Filter effect. The Vinyl Recording and Restoration Tool sees modest improvements but its ability to clean up recordings remains basic compared to dedicated software such as Magix Audio Cleaning Lab. Most of the other new features are refinements to the interface, such as the ability to dock floating windows and use tabs to jump between them. There’s support for AAC files for both import and export, too. Supported audio resolutions are up from 24-bit, 96kHz to 32-bit, 192kHz. However, because it works directly on files rather than by importing to and exporting from a timeline, we frequently find ourselves calling on its services for various tasks: stereo recording, truncating files, format conversion and sample-level surgical edits are just a few examples.