ORIGINAL: kb420

Do any of you use Scott Garrigus's book Sound Forge 8 Power? I just bought it to look through before I actually buy the program. Is it a good reference/instructional tool for SF?

I bought it 'cause the extremely thin manual that shipped with mine was in Japanese! It's OK. What has been far more valuable to me - 'cause I'm a visual thinker who doesn't like to read - was the seminar DVDs that I found online for $55. They're interactive lessons - awesome.

I just watched a bunch more tonight... I can't imagine not having SF anymore, and I was VERY skeptical about the need for it.

I don’t believe anything can compete with ACID Pro as a loop based audio sequencer/editor for ease of use and powerful editing, and Sony no longer provides a hard copy user’s manual for that or Vegas either.

I thought Acid pro should be compared to Project 5, instead of Sonar. Have you looked at P5?

I haven’t really looked into P5 too closely yet as being I had just moved, money as been a bit tight, and that is one of the reasons I’m here at the user’s forums. I love P4, I have no complaints and it's hard to imagine how it can be improved on.
As much of a gearhead as I am, I'm not all that excited over the 64 bit sound engine as 32 bit is so far into the over kill zone for us mere mortals targeting 16/44.1 CD market.
Though I do like the little things, it's really nice to see Cakewalk finally tweaked and added to the MIDI sequencer, and the V-Vocal looks like a great addition.
Cakewalk adding a convolution reverb is REALLY increadibly sweet for those that don't have one, but I already have the Waves IR-1 and Sound Forge's Acoustic Mirror.
I can’t tell you how nice it is to actually see posts by admin again, and intelligent and informed posts by users. That is all too rare at Sony Media/ACID Planet forums these days.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking of upgrading soon, I’m currently working on several song projects in P4 nearing completion that I’ve been focusing on, as well as tutoring a few collaborator friends who jumped ship from Cubase SX and Pro Tools.
When they came over and saw how stable and nicely P4 can record 8 audio tracks at once in real-time with Macke Control, M-Audio Delta 1010 that’s all she wrote.
They pretty much went into the freak zone exploring all the built in included buzzers and bells.
Things are really nice now that we all use the same software and Windows PC platform which as finally come of age in the past few years.
I flat out gave up on my Mac Pro Tools MOTU set up when they jumped from OS-9 to OS-X and core audio drivers, what a train wreck that was for 6 months or so, and a very PRICY one too.
That was right about the time when Sonar 3 came out so it was bye bye Mac and I never looked back.
I always loved Windows PC multi tasking architecture Cakewalk’s MIDI sequencing and only went to Mac for multi track audio recording which was excellent, though seriously lacking for MIDI support.


I never like to upgrade in the middle of things because when I finally do I know I’ll be digging deep into P5.

A while back I mused about getting out of Sound Forge and CDA - unfortunately I haven't really found a replacement - CW's Pyro proved to be less than pro for me and I don't like making audio CD's with Roxio and the like - on the editor side, I have audtion - I've used it farily regularly - I've just built so many presets and I like the batch processing I am stuck and I think Sony loves it.

-D

Hi guys...

Yep, my Sound Forge 8 Power book is now available. You can find more info and get a discount by going to my site:
http://www.garrigus.com/powerbooks.asp

You'll also find a couple excerpts here...

http://www.digifreq.com/digifreq/article.asp?ID=40

http://www.digifreq.com/digifreq/tip.asp?ID=11

with more to come soon...

Thanks!
Scott

--
Scott R. Garrigus - Author of Cakewalk, Sound Forge and Sound Forge 6, SONAR, SONAR 2, SONAR 3, SONAR 4, and Sound Forge 8 Power! books. ** Sonar 5 Power The Comprehensive Guide - Now Available! ** Books up to 37% off at:
http://www.garrigus.com/

Publisher of DigiFreq. Win a free copy of Cakewalk's Sonar 5 music recording software and learn cool music technology tips and techniques by getting a FREE subscription to DigiFreq... over 18,000 readers can't be wrong! Go to:
http://www.digifreq.com/digifreq/

Just a quick note about a recent experience with Sound Forge support.

I too was looking for an audio editor to go along with Sonar... I focused primarly on Adobe Audition 2 (since I have the rest of their Video Collection) and Sound Forge 8 (since I have a copy of Sound Forge 5 that I once used quite a bit, but stopped for some reason).
After demo-ing Audition, and liking some things about it (particularly the video integration with the other adobe apps), I decided to hold off altogether until I decided what I really wanted to use it for... meaning, I have audio multitracking in Sonar and Cubase... what I really wanted was an editor.

So... I decided to install my copy of Sound Forge 5 and use it in the mean time. However, when attempting to download product updates, Sony had dropped support for version 5 for "technical reasons."
I emailed them last night asking where I could get the updates for version 5, and by end of day today they had replied with an apology and a vague explanation of the support drop for Sound Forge 5, AND a new license and download link for Sound Forge 7 for free.

It's my first and only experience with Sony support for Sound Forge, but if you ask me that's stellar. It's not version 8, but it was FREE, and to me that's pretty cool.
I'll definitely go with Sound Forge for the immediate future. It showed up in the Tools menu of Sonar with no configuration on my part as well.
Sweet.

SONAR 5.0.1 has stopped asking me if I want to import the new version...how do I re-enable this? Any ideas? It is quite frustrating!

EDIT: Discovered you have to have "Copy events as linked clips" enabled for this to work properly.

SoundForge 5 and SoundForge 8 seem to normalize totally differently. Despite requesting -16db for music, in SF8 it is significantly louder than in SF5 (with precisely the same settings) and even still hits 0db on its peaks, whereas SF5 never (well, mostly never) does this on -16db.

Also, SF8 is based on dotNet, which may be the reason it stutters when you change window size and other things whilst playing back. SF5 is more well behaved on this.

I thought this was good for a bump, but also have a question: when you guys say that you are able to use the Sound Forge VSTs in Sonar, are you saying that you are able to use them in real time? I myself am unable to use SF effects in real time in Sonar without immediate dropouts, regardless of aud.ini settings; and have found references in old posts that seem to say that Sound Forge effects aren't real time effective in any program. If there is some kind of work-around that I don't know about I'd love to hear it.

Bump.