Product Reviews

Soundtrack is Apple's audio tool for creating musical backgrounds to accompany video. Initially only available as part of Final Cut Pro 4, it created such a buzz that the company has now released it as a standalone application.

Installing Soundtrack requires a DVD-ROM drive and it will take up 4Gb of disk space for its extensive library of audio files. This comprises mainly music loops covering a wide range of genres, plus sound effects and spoken phrases.

Soundtrack has one video track and up to 127 audio tracks. It can record audio and supports resolutions up to 24-bit and 96KHz. Soundtrack's Media Manager window on the left of the interface keeps tabs on all your files. It features a Browser, a Favourites menu and Search option. The Browser and Favourites are used to locate the desired video file and additional audio. The video frame can simply be dragged and dropped into the video pane. A thumbnail video track is created with its audio track below and this can be muted or mixed with the music.

The Search menu is used to access Soundtrack's audio library. It shows either Keywords (instrument names) with an adjacent Match sub menu, or alternatively you can opt to view a grid of 24 instruments. Click on an instrument and it brings up a list of available audio files. This can run into thousands, so only 50 are listed at a time, with Forward and Back arrow icons flipping through any additional listings. Beats and piecesSearches can be filtered with a choice of time signature and key. Lists can also be ordered by their original tempo. A Refine Search field will pick out files by name. The Media Manager has its own transport

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keys and volume control for the previews it displayed with the selection.

To begin creating your composition, the tempo, time signature and key need to be defined in the Master Controls situated at the top of the Project workspace - the main window hosting the video track and audio tracks. Setting the tempo in this way results in all the listed loops changing tempo to suit. Setting the key will instantly transpose playback of all listed audio files to match.

With these parameters established, creating a musical arrangement is merely a matter of dragging an audio file and dropping it into the Project workspace. A track is created with an appropriate icon that can be changed to suit your customised recordings. The audio part appears as a green block in the Timeline. Multitrack arrangements can be constructed quickly by previewing audio files and dragging them to the Timeline. Final Cut Pro 4 can embed Scoring Markers (music cues) in its Export For Soundtrack video files. In Soundtrack, the Scoring Markers appeared to be correctly spaced but were actually in the wrong place on the timeline. Back on trackControl-click on an item and it reveals options for transposition of two or four times. Overall, it works very well and the range of musical genres is rich and varied. Some musical knowledge is useful, and the build up of tracks can soon sound messy, so care is needed over the arrangements. There's no conventional mixer in Soundtrack as levels are controlled from Envelopes in the track window. These appear as graphical automation below each track. If effects are being used, certain parameters can be altered in this way too. We had problems with some pre-installed effects, and sadly effects can't be shared across multiple tracks.

The Soundtrack Utility enables loops to be created from your own source material. It has an editable transient detection page that analyses the audio for its individual beats in order to enable seamless timestretching. The Utility also has options for categorisation of the audio, which will be useful when building up a library of samples.

Soundtrack is an extremely useful application, and it's only a matter of time before its recognisable phrases appear on mainstream recordings.