Sony Sound Forge

When I started editing audio - and truly, I’m not talking about pre-World War days - we used quarter inch reel-to-reel magnetic tape, a crayon to mark the spot, and a scarily sharp razor blade to slice the tape. We would then piece it back together with sticky tape. In the digital era, I’ve used a variety of computer based sound programs, and I’m prety confident in my assertion that the best by a mile, is Sony Sound Forge.

Sound Forge’s most direct rival in the commercial market is Adobe Audition (formally known as Cool Edit Pro). This suffers from a cluttered work space, which feels claustrophobic. At least for me, doing the edits on Audition doesn’t come naturally.

The complicated and expensive SADiE, imitates the effect of razor editing - you can rock the sound back and forth as you could in the old days when you could move the reels of the tape machine by hand. This was how you used to find the beginning of a word. There’s no need for that these days, when you can see the sound wave in great detail. It comes with hardware and software. Most of us just want to download some software onto our computer.

Audacity has the huge advantage of being free (you also need the free lame plug-in to work with Mp3s). It’s really a good effort, but it’s not in Sound Forge’s league. Its a main fault is that, as with Adobe Audition, the window in which you work is really confined. Editing is the standard process of Block/Cut/Paste. But Audacity doesn’t really help you to find the start and the finish of what you want to cut.

Audacity has some post-production features, but most of them area really not up to anything and will make your sound truly horrible. Sorry Audacity people, but it’s true. No doubt it will improve in future versions.

Sound Forge has a beautifully large, uncluttered, workspace, that hasn’t changed since Sony bought Sound Forge from it’s original developers, Sonic Foundry. And it also makes sound-editing really easy.

The first handy trick is the ability to drop a marker at the touch of the keyboard letter “M”. You put a marker before and after the sound wave that you want to cut. This is great, because when you scroll back and forward you can find your place on the screen (otherwise it’s easy to lose, as one piece of sound wave looks much like another) . You can block the segment that you want to cut simply by double-clicking between the two markers (so it doesn’t matter if the end of the segment is off the screen and out of view). And next, a really useful feature, you can preview your edit before you make it by pressing “Control K”. This is a real time saver. You cut with Control X.

For tricky edits, you can zero in on any section of the sound wave using the magnifying glass. You can make the wave as large as you want, and place your marker exactly at the start or finish of a word. It’s about as precise as you can get.

It comes in two versions. Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio is the budget option and does most of what you want. You can save files in 16 bit /44 kHz which is standard quality for podcasting. It has quite a few post-production features, including a high quality graphic equalizer (for tweaking the base and higher freqencies) and a “normalizer” which evens out the sound levels. It has a very good cross-fade (find under “special paste”).

The more expensive version, Sony Sound Forge 8, allows you to save your work in deeper sound quality - mostly for recording music on CDs. It has more post-production features, including the Wave Hammer which compresses the audio, making it sound smooth and even in texture. This feature is really for boy bands who don’t shave yet. Podcasters shouldn’t miss it much. Saving it as an MP3 compresses it anyway.

Sound Forge Audio Studio 8 costs $70 direct from Sony, but only $55 from Amazon.com

Sound Forge 8 costs $300 direct from Sony, but only $200 from Amazon.com, saving you $100.

This entry was posted on November 21st, 2005 and is filed under Blog Home, Blog Tips, Podcast Tips, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.