Digital Music Doctor Newsletter

Digital Music Doctor
Newsletter

May 2005

Sound Forge 8 - Know It All! Now Available

The latest addition to our library of interactive video courses, Sound Forge 8 - Know It All!, is now available. Sound Forge has been a popular audio editor for many years, and we have received a number of requests from people who also own Cubase, Sonar, and Acid for a course on Sound Forge. Sound Forge 8 was released in March, 2005 and is bundled with CD Architect 5.2 which we also cover in the tutorials. A preview of what's new in Sound Forge 8 is available at http://www.digitalmusicdoctor.com/soundforge/.

Loop Invasion: Can Sonar & Cubase Take On Acid Pro?

Sonic Foundry Acid (acquired by Sony in 2003) defined the loop composition paradigm when it was released in 1998 and remains the leader. But in recent times Sonar and Cubase have been moving aggressively to make inroads into that space. Cakewalk threw down the gauntlet first. Sonar 2 introduced Groove Clips, the Loop Construction View and the Loop Explorer. Steinberg was curiously quiet on the subject until Cubase SX 3 which added their Audio Warp functions.

So if you're into loops, do you really need Acid? Or can you do just as well with Cubase or Sonar and have the added benefits of full-fledged music production systems? There is now a new analysis on our website which looks at a subset of the features in Cubase SX 3 and Sonar 4 Producer Edition that relate to loop composition and compares the functionality to the recently released, Sony Acid Pro 5. Forty different functions in eight loop-composition related categories are included in the analysis. You can view the entire analysis at http://www.digitalmusicdoctor.com/loopinvasion.htm.

Digital Downloads Now Available

All of our latest courses have recently been made available for download. We are moving aggressively to take advantage of the fact that two-thirds of the world's Internet users now have broadband. The download version of each course has the same content and audio-video quality as our CD-rom version and is packaged as two large files (100-200 MB each) which require 10-20 minutes each to download with an Internet connection speed of at least 1.5 Mbps. Since the video in our courses uses the compression techniques of Macromedia Flash, the file size of our tutorials is typically about one-fifth that of other videos which use non-compressed formats. That means we can offer equal or better video quality and still require less download time, less file space on your computer, and use less memory.

Digital Music Doctor
Interactive Video Courses for Musicians