#Is sound forge pro good upgrade#
#Is sound forge pro good professional#

It offers enough powerful new tools to be just about worth the upgrade fee for serious users, although we probably wouldn't describe it as an essential upgrade for those who just edit and process single samples with it, rather than recording, mastering or compositing.įor the newcomer, at under $400 it sits comfortably between Steinberg Wavelab and Adobe Audition on the price scale, and the bundling of iZotope's excellent Nectar Elements certainly adds value. Sound Forge Pro 11 maintains the position of Sony's venerable application at the top table of audio editors. Not a game-changing feature, perhaps, but one that we certainly appreciate in terms of speeding up workflow. If you have Sony's new SpectraLayers Pro 2 (which we'll be reviewing next issue) installed alongside Sound Forge Pro 11, you'll be delighted to hear that you can send files or range selections from one to the other with a click of the mouse. Related to that, the addition of the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (CALM) metering standard will keep you on the straight and narrow should you find yourself mastering audio for US media. While peak meters just tell you how much headroom you've got available, the new Momentary, Short, Integrated and Loudness Range meters give insight into the energy of the track and how loudly the mix will be perceived to be.

#Is sound forge pro good professional#

Standard peak metering is a long way short of ideal when it comes to mastering and conforming to professional loudness standards, so it's great to see some proper loudness analysers added to Sound Forge at last, giving better feedback on headroom and use of dynamic range. In addition to the standard metering plugins, Sound Forge Pro 11 brings us a range of all-new Loudness Meters. Yes, at last you can have multiple plugin editors open at once and placed wherever you like onscreen - we have to wonder why it's taken 11 versions for this basic feature to finally appear, but better late than never. The Plugin Chainer has received a minor but welcome improvement in the addition of floating plugin windows, meaning that your plugin interfaces are no longer tied to the Chainer itself. 'At last you can have multiple plugin editors open at once and placed wherever you like onscreen' Event mode is a massive selling point for Sound Forge Pro, giving the ability to composite audio together in a manner more reminiscent of a DAW than a traditional wave editor.įor such a powerful feature, it's remarkably easy to use, and with the new locking function you can keep automation, markers and other data tied to events so that they follow them when you move them around. The Event mode, introduced in Sound Forge Pro 10, now enables automatic rippling (ie, shifting along the timeline) of events when moving, cutting, mixing and deleting them. Most of the record options, incidentally, are now accessible through a floating window for faster access than in previous versions. The audio is recorded unprocessed, but you do have the option of applying the effects should you decide to commit to that killer chain.

This opens up a range of useful possibilities, such as custom analysis chains, processed monitor feeds for vocalists, and the application of live effects to hear how your recordings will sound when you twist them up later. The monitoring side of things now includes the ability for the input monitor to use the plugin chain. Obviously, the option to extract all your takes as separate files would be good, but if you're looking to do that sort of serious recording, you'd probably be better off using a DAW anyway.