Although this means that the transition between the PC and Mac versions is not a totally transparent experience for users, it does mean that SFPM looks very clean and fresh.
While it bears some visual similarities to Sound Forge on the PC, Sony are at pains to point out that this is not a port: Sound Forge Pro Mac 1.0 has been built from scratch for OS X. To the surprise of many, given their very long-standing PC-only product line, Sound Forge Pro Mac is with us now. Mac users, by contrast, recently lost one of the few well-specified Mac-only audio editing packages when BIAS went out of business but, fortunately, Sony have now followed Steinberg in porting their flagship program to the platform.
In recent years, the Windows platform has been much better supplied for audio editing software than the Mac, thanks to applications such as Steinberg's Wavelab, Adobe's Audition and Sony's Sound Forge. One of the giants of the Windows audio world has made it to the Mac at last. In that context and at that price, Sound Forge Audio Studio makes a lot of sense.The Sound Forge Pro Mac interface is easy to use and fully customisable.
If you’re also shopping for some video-editing software, consider Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 Production Suite, which bundles the consumer versions of Vegas and Sound Forge and costs £69 from Amazon. Expect the price to fall when boxed copies arrive the UK, though. We don’t expect the same quality of effects as offered in Sound Forge Pro, but something approaching it would be welcome.Īt £45, it’s a tad expensive for what is ultimately a supporting application, and a pared down one at that (the full-fat Sound Forge Pro 10 is much more powerful but costs £309 ex VAT). Other frustrations are the inability to chain effects and the lack of high quality mastering effects for sprucing up finished mixes – a task the software is otherwise perfect for. It seems daft having to import a file into Vegas or Acid in order to change the pitch or tempo, and then export it back out again, but the difference in quality means it’s an inconvenience worth bearing. Sound Forge Pro 10’s improved time-stretch and pitch-shift algorithm, Elastique Pro, hasn’t made it over to this cut-price version, even though it is included in the consumer-oriented Studio versions of Vegas and Acid. It’s prone to digital distortion, and the linear rather than logarithmic frequency control makes it difficult to fine-tune settings. This same effect failed to impress us when we met it in Sound Forge Pro 10. The only new feature that’s not a workflow improvement is the Resonant Filter effect.
The Vinyl Recording and Restoration Tool sees modest improvements but its ability to clean up recordings remains basic compared to dedicated software such as Magix Audio Cleaning Lab. Most of the other new features are refinements to the interface, such as the ability to dock floating windows and use tabs to jump between them. There’s support for AAC files for both import and export, too.
Supported audio resolutions are up from 24-bit, 96kHz to 32-bit, 192kHz.
However, because it works directly on files rather than by importing to and exporting from a timeline, we frequently find ourselves calling on its services for various tasks: stereo recording, truncating files, format conversion and sample-level surgical edits are just a few examples.