Great tool (Sonic Foundry Sound Forge)

Member Name: SEoD

Product:	Sonic Foundry Sound Forge
Date:	26/02/01 (420 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good interface, plenty of good tools

Disadvantages: Price, plugin chainer is over-complex

Sounic Foundry have been reported as being in a little bit of financial trouble recently, but do not assume that this is because of badly written software.

Unlike the majority of their other products, Sound Forge is aimed squarely at the professional end of the PC audio market. The versions tend to come out at pretty long intervals though, so don't expect your investment to become worthless in a month as with so many audio programs.

Sound Forge is a conveniently laid-out audio editor. The interface is minimal and unless you have a great memory, you'll probably dispense with the toolbars altogether and just use the standard Windows menu system to perform most of your functions.

Recent versions of Sound Forge allow DirectX plugins to be used to process sounds, but to use more than one at a time (in preview) you need to use the audio plugin chainer. This is a somewhat fiddly process if you've ever used wavelab, but far from impossible to overcome.

The built-in functions are very good with three different types of EQing to suit your taste, and some fairly basic chorus, reverb and distortion effects. Time-stretching (without pitch change) can be done quickly and easily and even by tempo so you don't have to get the calculator out every time you open a loop.

Sampler support is very good, and the loop-tuner is a godsend for anyone trying to make seamless loops without nasty clicks and pops. Also, Sound Forge is useful for anyone editing the soundtrack to digital videos, as frames of the video can be seen over the main audio waveform to allow easy sync'ing. The guy who made the FMVs (video sequences) for TombRaider used Sound Forge, so it can definitely be used for big files.

The downside is that it can sometimes be a little slow to process some functions on very large audio files unless you have your wave open in direct mode. This and the plugin chainer are the only two areas where Sound Forge loses
out to WaveLab, but they are relatively minor when you consider all the advantages it has.

Add to this the minimal amount of RAM and processor required to use it and its rock-solid stability, and it's clearly the professional choice for audio editing.

Summary: