Loud and proud
audio clips are arranged and edited for eventual rendering as a single file. It’s all good stuff, and the software’s general workflow and fluidity are smooth enough, although the continuing lack of a window layout recall system is frustrating. The most notable new features in Sound Forge Pro Mac 3, beyond the bundling in of iZotope’s RX and Ozone Elements (see Conquering the Elements), are the addition of five internal plugins, Loudness Levelling and the Find/Repair tool.
The plugins comprise Noise Gate, Chorus, Simple Delay, Reverb and Flange/Wah-Wah, and are all perfectly serviceable if you don’t have better third-party options available (which you almost certainly do). The drab, generic GUI they share, however, doesn’t exactly impart any sense of professionalism or character.
Loudness Levelling is a new entry in the Tools menu that, when activated, automatically adjusts the loudness of the selected audio file to make it compliant with the EBU R128 or ATSC A85 broadcast standards, as selected in the Loudness Meters’ Mode menu.
The Find/Repair tool is a two-tabbed panel. In the Find tab, you tell the engine what to look for in the selected audio file: ‘Glitch’ (clicks and pops), ‘Level above’ (the next point at which the level exceeds a specified threshold), ‘End of silent region’, ‘Largest peak’ and ‘Clip’ (places markers at all points in the waveform where the signal exceeds a specified clip level). The controls in the Repair tab then handle selected glitches and overs in one of three ways: ‘Interpolate’ joins the ends of the wave on either side of the selection with a straight line; ‘Replace’ overwrites the selection with the material immediately preceding it and crossfades the edges; and ‘Copy other channel’ replaces the material one stereo channel with that of the other. It’s a fairly simple system, but for basic fixes, it gets the job done.
The remaining new additions to SFPM3 are less attention-grabbing but worth mentioning. Mastered for iTunes auditioning lets you hear how your masters will sound when uploaded to the iTunes Store; expanded plugin support now takes in AAX and RTAS as well as VST and AU; and although video playback is still notable by its absence, you can at least now import audio tracks from video files.
Forging ahead
There’s lots to like about the latest Sound Forge for Mac, but quite a few annoyances, too. The manual uses OS X’s awful built-in help interface (PDF, please!); the right-click menu is woefully understocked; and spectral analysis and batch processing require separate apps, to name a few. Alarmingly, there also doesn’t appear to be an upgrade option for owners of v2 right now, although we hear that Magix will be offering one at some point. Until that happens, we certainly wouldn’t recommend that existing users pay full price for what, iZotope add-ons aside, seems more like a point release than a full version update.
Taken on its own terms, Sound Forge Pro Mac 3 is a flexible and thoroughly usable audio editor with manageable weaknesses and omissions. If you don’t need those iZotope goodies, however, the price could prove hard to swallow, and we can’t help feeling it’s about time parity was achieved with its PC counterpart. www.magix-audio.com
“There’s lots to like about the latest Sound Forge for Mac, but quite a few annoyances, too”