Product Reviews

When Apple introduced Soundtrack, the idea was to create background music and effects tracks for video. With thousands of music loops that automatically matched the project's key and tempo, Soundtrack's sound-to-picture functions made it easy to mock up a film score. Soundtrack Pro goes beyond stringing loops together, and expands into sound design and audio sweetening. There's no surround sound mixing capability, but the audio can be routed to multiple outputs.

Soundtrack Pro is available separately or as part of Final Cut Studio. Installation requires a serial number and includes 7.25GB of audio loops and effects. An updated Apple Loops Utility is also installed for adapting home-made audio files so you can apply real-time key-change and tempo treatments.

Final Cut Pro's integration with Soundtrack Pro enables it to send files for enhancement or a full-blown A/V experience. Final Cut Pro's video-scoring markers appear in orange in Soundtrack Pro, acting as cues for music and effects positioning. As with Final Cut Pro, the main interface windows can be detached and resized. The top-left Utility window has four tabs: Video (playback display), Recording (sound options), Meters (level indicators) and Details (media information). Below that is the Media and Effects Manager window, which features a file browser that shows the various categories of audio with instant previews. This area is also home to the real-time effects plug-ins, which can be applied individually to each track or globally using effects sends and bus tracks on the new mixer.

A customisable toolbar sits along the top of the Project window for access to frequently used functions. You build up audio sequences just like in GarageBand, and then use tabs to view different arrangements and to switch over to the Waveform Editor and back. Double-clicking an audio file opens up the graphical Waveform Editor, which

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enables you to manipulate individual audio files, with changes shown in the adjacent Actions list. A separate Effects menu lets you preview treatments and build up multiple layers of effects and editing actions for a specific audio file. This file can be a composite of others, too, as the Waveform Editor has numerous options for adding and blending audio segments.

Choosing Analysis toggles the Actions list over to Analysis Type options, such as Clicks and Pops, Power Line Hum and Clipped Signal. Click Analyze and Soundtrack seeks out these erroneous artefacts and highlights them in red on the waveform display. The de-noising process is more sophisticated and works by taking a sample of noisy audio from which noise is removed by a variable amount. If this is applied too heavily, the room ambience suffers, making dialogue sound boxy. The Noise Only function reveals what's being taken out, monitoring whether good audio is being eaten into.

Soundtrack Pro features more than 50 professional plug-ins, including Space Designer. This classy reverb replicates natural sound environments based on special audio (Impulse Response) files that capture the sound of real rooms and spaces. It's ideal for atmospheric soundscapes and intimate locations, and comes with a wide range of great-sounding IR files, as well as CPU-saving synthesised effects. The new mixer confines the complexity of audio treatments to the Arrange and Waveform pages, providing only basic controls, plus automation. However, it does support multiple output buses for separate dialogue, effects and music sub-mixes.

Whenever we opened a new audio file in the Waveform Editor, the audio input monitor switched on when it was set to off, causing a feedback loop from the mic. Switching between Arrange and Waveform modes was sluggish when several edit tabs were in use. Worse, muted tracks could still be heard through effects sends in the default to pre-fader mode. Mute means mute, so sound shouldn't creep in like this.

Although Soundtrack Pro supports Midi synchronisation, there's no Midi sequencing. This would be useful even for simple things such as menacingly low piano notes. Midi sequences could easily be rendered into audio files, opening up the application to atmospheric sound generators such as NI's Absynth. Time will tell if Soundtrack Pro expands its composition functions to Midi, but for now the focus is scoring, sweetening and seamless sound design, which it does remarkably well for the price.