Sony Sound Forge 9
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jason Blum
VETERAN AUDIO EDITOR BRANCHES OUT WHILE STICKING TO ITS ROOTS
Sound Forge 9's streamlined interface incorporates many elements from its original version introduced in the early '90s.
If you were involved in audio production at any point during the '90s, you probably knew about Sound Forge. When it burst onto the fledgling computer audio scene in 1991, this groundbreaking application was manna from heaven for producers and musicians who longed for the power and control of something like Pro Tools but couldn't afford the hefty capital that those big boys required. Sound Forge offered everything the others didn't: a quick, easy, inexpensive way to edit 2-channel audio without pledging your firstborn to the bank.
Now, 17 years later, Sound Forge is still alive and kicking under the Sony umbrella and sporting a fresh coat of paint along with a few new tricks. Multichannel audio is now in the picture, along with bundled mastering plug-ins from iZotope and a gratis copy of Sony Noise Reduction software sweetening the deal. However, the playing field is a lot more crowded and unforgiving these days other editors such as Steinberg Wavelab and Adobe Audition have upped the ante considerably over the years but Sound Forge has managed to hang on to a loyal base of customers who swear by its power and simplicity. I put Sound Forge 9 through its paces on a couple of projects to see if it holds its own in the face of today's stiff competition and to see if I could rekindle the spark I had with this program back at the beginning of my career.
FAMILIAR FACE
Installing Sound Forge is simple, and registration takes a quick online handshake with Sony's authentication servers. Strangely, CD Architect is still a separate program with its own installation procedure, and it doesn't integrate direct with Sound Forge; recording proper discs still requires shuffling data between the two applications.
At first glance, there doesn't seem to be a big difference between the old-school Sound Forge and version 9, which is a testament to great design. All the tools you need are close at hand, and menus are familiar without any deep-nested commands, creating the feeling that doing real work won't require sifting through manuals. As with previous versions, Sound Forge's toolbars are completely customizable and freely movable to all four sides of the screen. Most floating windows such as the plug-in manager, meters and video window will dock and resize as well, allowing you to create orderly layouts that fit your personal work style.
SLICE AND DICE
Sound Forge 9 offers all the standard kit you'd expect from a top-end audio editor: cut, copy, paste, pencil tools, detailed analysis capabilities, a bevy of standard effects and plenty of audio restoration tools, including the Sony Noise Reduction plug-in. Editing in general is a bit smoother in version 9, thanks to support for drag-and-drop between channels, as well as snap-to functionality for grid, marker and selection boundaries. The Plug-in Chainer handles limitless chains of VST and DirectX plug-ins elegantly, and Sony kicks in four of iZotope's mastering plug-ins free of charge, which makes the $319 list price pleasantly palatable.
Sound Forge's pristine audio engine can handle as high as 64-bit/192 kHz files. You can open multiple files with various bit depths and sampling rates in the program's work space, but there's no on-the-fly conversion if you need to actually mix together two separate files with different sampling rates. Instead, the program gently reminds you that the rates are different and suggests using Sound Forge's offline converter to bring the files to common ground.
WATCHING MULTICHANNELS
It's important to note that Sound Forge's multichannel audio isn't quite like the Audio Montage in Wavelab or the VIP workspaces in Magix Samplitude; it is literally multiple audio channels in a single file and not multiple tracks in a project. That's a critical distinction saving a 12-channel WAV file in Sound Forge is literally a 12-channel file, not a Sound Forge project with 12 separate tracks. You can insert different tracks directly into different channels and save that project as a different FRG file, but ultimately Sony doesn't want Sound Forge to compete with its own Acid Pro and Vegas Pro multitrack apps.
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