Vegas + Acid vs Sound Forge

cheroxy wrote on 8/20/2013, 5:25 PM
What more could I do with Sound Forge Studio or Pro that I can't already do with Vegas and Acid? My son wants to get into making some Electronic Dance Music. I am very familiar with Vegas. I've messed around once w/ virtual instruments in Acid connected via USB to our digital piano. I don't know anything really about music production and he doesn't need anything super amazing, but if it would be good to get either SF I'll do it.

Comments

ddm wrote on 8/20/2013, 5:51 PM
Acid is far more geared toward music production than Vegas or SoundForge. Electronic music is it's forte, as well. Lots of looped based stuff. Acid can take a loop and alter the tempo and/or pitch etc, supports midi, it is a music production tool. SF could accomplish a lot, I suppose, it just wasn't designed specifically for the task at hand. The downside of Acid is that Acid Pro 7 is so old now, although it still works perfectly, even in Windows 8.1 preview. Depending on his needs, the newer, consumer based Acid product might be more than enough for his needs, it seems quite comparable to the old Acid Pro, not sure what the limitations are.
cheroxy wrote on 8/20/2013, 6:24 PM
That is what it seemed like from having Vegas and Acid. Is SF just a more detail specific audio editor compared to what Vegas and Acid can do?
dlion wrote on 8/21/2013, 9:08 AM
yes. i just upgraded my sound forge from 9 to 11 to get the ozone mastering plugins and nectar...

but for your son, acid is the way to go!
ddm wrote on 8/21/2013, 2:12 PM
>>> Is SF just a more detail specific audio editor compared to what Vegas and Acid can do?

SF is a sound editing program, it can do many things, it is an excellent sound editing program. That being said, Vegas and Acid can also edit sound, quite nicely, I might add. I prefer to edit sound in Vegas. Many years ago I stumbled onto the joy of sound editing on the Vegas multitrack timeline as opposed to the single track metaphor that most sound editing software used at the time (as SF still does). I found that by splicing a track and dropping the B side of an edit to it's own track, and then playing with overlapping the edit and adjusting the crossfade was an infinitely more powerful way to edit. A commonplace metaphor nowadays, but my audio editing experience goes back to the old razor blade days, and I believe most editing software reflected that organic method, initially. I'm pretty sure you can edit in SF this way now since it does support multitracks but Vegas does this so well there's rarely an instance that I've come across where I can't edit together even two quite divergent audio sources together seamlessly.

Sorry to wander off topic a bit. Key point about your situation, I think, is that Acid is designed as a music production tool and is remarkably powerful still, Reaper is what I now use but it's a little harder to learn than Acid.
cheroxy wrote on 8/22/2013, 9:13 PM
Thanks for the replies everyone!