MAGIX SOUND FORGE PRO MAC 3

The OS X version of this veteran audio editor has had a turbulent first few years in development, but will it thrive under new ownership?

With Sony unwilling to put any great resources into their Sound Forge audio editor (acquired from Sonic Foundry in 2003 when it was PC-only, and joined by a ground-up Mac version in 2012), German stalwarts Magix have stepped in and bought it, and are promising to restore this once-keystone studio app to its former glory. In our review of Sound Forge Pro Mac v1 in 186, we scored it 7/10, lamenting its relative simplicity in comparison to the superior PC version – and alas, this disparity still remains. Sound Forge Pro on PC is currently at v11, with v12 coming later this year; and although it wouldn’t be at all fair to suggest that it’s eight generations ahead of the Mac version in anything but age and numbering, there are still a few important things missing, including spectrum analysis, video support and built-in batch conversion (you get the separate Convrt app instead).

Anyhoo, we are where we are, and despite being relatively lightweight in comparison to its nearest competition – Steinberg’s megalithic WaveLab – Sound Forge Pro Mac 3 has plenty to offer the Mac-based producer.

If it ain’t broke

Two of Sound Forge Pro Mac’s defining features have always been the configurability of the GUI and its two distinct editing modes, both of which are unchanged in v3. The many panes of the interface (Media Browser, meters, Recorder, Plug-In Chooser, Regions List, etc) can be freely moved around, and two main waveform Edit windows can be opened at once, each housing its own tabbed series of audio files. In Time mode, edits are made in the usual way, selecting regions within an audio clip for cutting, copying, pasting, processing, etc. In Event mode, the edit window effectively becomes a DAW-style ‘track’, on which

“In Time mode, edits are made in the usual way, selecting regions for cutting, copying, pasting, processing etc”