Sound Forge 10 – Building on Strength

Sony recently released a new version of Sound Forge, and we have now added a new training course for Sound Forge 10. Sound Forge, like most Digital Audio Editors, is a mature product. Thus the new features and functions are relatively incremental. Nonetheless, these enhancements do add significant value to this audio workhorse. We cover the major new functions in-depth in the new tutorials, but I’ll go over the highlights here.

Disc-at-Once – Instant Multitrack CD’s

One convenient new feature is Disc-at-Once, which allows you to burn a multitrack CD directly from Sound Forge. The Sound Forge bundle already includes CD Architect which is a separate application for creating CD’s. Even though CD Architect is integrated with Sound Forge, it is more convenient to be able to burn a CD with a few tracks (such as you might want to do to prepare demo) directly from Sound Forge. We have created a YouTube video of an excerpt from our training course which explains how to use the Disk-at-Once feature.

Event Based Editing – Mark Your Changes

  Another convenient feature incorporated into Sound Forge 10 is Event Based Editing. Now anytime you make a change to the audio in a data window, such as copying, pasting or increasing the volume, Sound Forge creates an event which marks the area that has changed. This facility makes it easier to go back and tweak the change if necessary, since you can easily recall the exact areas that have been modified.

Zplane Elastique – Time & Pitch Tool

As any of you who work with time stretching or pitch shifting audio are aware, it can be very difficult to achieve quality-sounding results when making such changes. Thus in Sound Forge 10 Sony licensed time stretching and pitch shifting technology from Zplane Development to augment its existing plug-ins that perform similar functions. There are many such plug-ins available these days, so the proof of the pudding is how well this one compares to the competition. We have added Zplane Elastique to the time stretching and pitch shifting sections of our Listen & Compare feature so you can decide for yourself. If you are interested in the subject we include a more detailed examination of the issues associated with time stretching and pitch shifting in our Digital Producer course.

iZotope Mastering Suite – More Plug-Ins

  Sound Forge 10 adds two mastering plug-ins, a spatial imager and an exciter, from iZotope. Several mastering plug-ins from iZotope were already included in Sound Forge, all of them scaled down versions of the Ozone Mastering Suite marketed by iZotope. The exciter is a collection of tube and tape saturation algorithms, which are usually referred to as “warmers” rather than exciters. Typically such plug-ins generate mild harmonics which many people find pleasing and thus add warmth to a mix. We have a more complete discussion of this type of effect in our Mixing & Mastering course.

The spatial imaging plug-in uses mid-side processing to control the width of a stereo image. You can use the principle of mid-side processing to separate a stereo mix into center and side components. In some circumstances you can effectively adjust the relative volumes of these two components to change the perceived width of the mix. Once again, we have a complete discussion of the use of mid-side processing in our Mixing & Mastering course.

The Laundry List

For the record here’s a summary of the new features listed by Sony. As you can see, there are also quite a few process and editing/workflow enhancements. Although over the years, many of the functions originally performed only by audio editors have been incorporated into Digital Audio Workstations, Sound Forge continues to be my “go to” app for serious audio editing and processing.