Product Reviews

Today's audio-production and video-editing applications aren't short of audio-manipulation tools, but, for some jobs, a dedicated stereo editor will always be more precise and efficient. Sound Forge, previously published under the Sonic Foundry banner, has earned loyal support for sample editing, sound design, mastering and format conversion duties. Now published by Sony, it's received its second major update in less than a year.

The first bit of good news is that the UK price is around £100 cheaper than version 7 retailed for - a change that's reflected across all of Sony's media-production software to bring UK pricing in line with download prices from the US website. What's more, the package now includes Sony CD Architect 5.2, which was bundled with version 7 by some but not all distributors. CD Architect is a straightforward but powerful program for producing Red Book audio CDs, and makes full PQ code editing, balancing levels, adding effects and creating crossfades an effortless experience.

Sound Forge handles simple editing tasks, such as truncating, fading, looping and splicing, with breathtaking agility, but its effects library remains more utilitarian than inspiring. The exception is the Acoustic Mirror reverb, which, despite a basic set of controls, uses convolution processing to give excellent results. However, the effects that are central to mastering - EQ, compression and limiting - fall short of the quality needed for serious work. DirectX plug-in support provides a solution, allowing third-party plug-ins from Waves and others to be used inside the program. The downside is that the best plug-ins cost hundreds of pounds each.

Version 8 removes this DirectX dependence thanks to support for VST plug-ins. This offers no inherent advantage over DirectX support, except that there are far more VST plug-ins in circulation, including a good number of excellent free ones. Meanwhile, TC Electronics' PowerCore and Universal Audio's UAD-1 platforms, which use dedicated DSP hardware to deliver some of the best plug-ins available, use the VST standard to interface with host software. Considering that Sony's flagship plug-ins (going by the Sony Oxford brand) utilise PowerCore hardware, Sound Forge's VST support isn't a moment too soon.

VST effects are accessed and used in exactly the same way as DirectX plug-ins. The only minor irritation is that they aren't arranged in the

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FX Favorites menu to reflect their folder structure on the disk, as most VST hosts do, which means a bit of housekeeping is required to get large VST plug-in collections in order. Sound Forge 7 introduced automation of DirectX plug-in settings by drawing envelopes over the waveform, and this has been extended to VST plug-ins. This is essential for mastering multipart productions or problem tracks, and is great for experimental sound design.

The other major addition in version 8 is ASIO driver support, which allows the software to communicate directly with the sound card rather than via Windows' MME audio driver. Although it's not as crucial to have ASIO here as it is in multitrack audio software such as Cubase or Acid, it will be welcome for anyone using sound cards that only support higher sample rates or bit depths when using ASIO drivers.

A new Batch Converter tool applies plug-ins, adds metadata and changes the resolution or format of groups of files. Batch conversion was included in previous versions in the form of a bundled standalone utility; while the new integrated tool offers no extra features, it's a little easier to use. It's extremely useful for format conversion, but applying plug-ins to batches of files is hampered by the lack of an audio preview. To get around this, it's possible to preview an effect on a single file in the normal manner, save its settings, then load them into the plug-in as it appears in the Batch Converter tool - but this seems unnecessarily long-winded. Sound Forge can now run scripts using the .NET Framework, but it isn't possible to record menu commands as macros.

The other new features are relatively few and minor. A scrub control allows the user to adjust playback speed from -400 to 400 per cent using the mouse. We found this useful for quickly scanning through recordings for a particular event, but it isn't responsive enough to be used to find precise edit points - this is still best done by eye from the waveform display.

Customisable keyboard mappings make it possible to define keyboard shortcuts for frequently used commands. We had no problems creating shortcuts for Fade In and Fade Out, and another to open the Graphic Fade dialog box. However, defining a shortcut for the Normalise function simply executed the process using the last-used settings rather than opening the dialog box, which isn't so useful.

Sound Forge 8 isn't the most adventurous update, but VST support alone will be enough for most users to justify upgrading. Happily, upgrades are possible from any previous version. Next on Sony's to-do list should be equipping Sound Forge for surround sound - something rival product Steinberg WaveLab already supports. Even so, for the vast majority of music and video producers still working in stereo, Sound Forge's reduced price and slicker operation make it the better value of the two products. Regardless of the valuable but scant new features, it remains a dependable workhorse for countless editing tasks.