Bought it at Fry's because it was free with rebates. I know it is a "lite" version so to speak, but does anyone in the forum use Studio 10, and how?

The lite (studio) versions of all of Sony's stuff is basically the power versions minus the high-end effects.  You can use it for editing your CD masters - I'm not sure if the lite version still won't do 24 bits.  Top and tail you songs and master them w/ other vst effects.  You can also go in and "draw" out hits that get close to 0 dB and thereby raise the average level of your mix.

You can also fine tune samples and drops for your music.

@

I've used SoundForge for years, it's a wonderful tool. It's what i would call a 'hard' editor; it's intended to allow you to modify audio files right on down to the sample level, if needed. You can apply effects as needed, and there are other tools for clip checking and so on.

I use the Lite Version with Sonar X2a. I use it for editing audio from Sonar projects via "Utilities." I prefer the workflow of an outside editor for certain tasks and Soundforge Lite does the job for me. And it does work fine with 24 bit.

Be aware that some versions back they rewrote the entire thing for dotNet (think Visual Basic), meaning you have to install a slow, memory-hungry set of runtime libraries.

So, it is worth it for the few bucks in tax then...