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Subject:Sound Forge vs. Audacity
Posted by: jpstory
Date:8/6/2008 11:34:27 AM

Hi all. I currently use the free Audacity program to do my audio editing, which largely consists of mixing voiceovers (audio essays) with background music. Except for its occasional bugginess, I like Audacity fine.

My question: what can Sound Forge do that Audacity can't? I put a lot of energy into capturing good audio (I record voiceovers in a quiet setting with nice mics), and am largely pleased with the audio quality. Am I missing something about Sound Forge? Will it let me do things like get a batch of voiceovers recorded at different levels to match levels? What else?

I'm always interested in trying software that will improve my end product and make my editing life easier, and I'm wondering what the core benefits of Sound Forge are.

Thanks for any responses to this pretty broad question.


Subject:RE: Sound Forge vs. Audacity
Reply by: nolonemo
Date:8/6/2008 5:10:44 PM

[deleted by user]

Message last edited on8/6/2008 5:13:23 PM bynolonemo.
Subject:RE: Sound Forge vs. Audacity
Reply by: Steven Myers
Date:8/6/2008 6:04:28 PM

You do realize that Sound Forge is not a multi-track app, right?

Subject:RE: Sound Forge vs. Audacity
Reply by: Geoff_Wood
Date:8/6/2008 7:30:12 PM

Depends what exactly you are doing, or want to do. Why not download the free demo and find out for yourself what extra functionality might be of benefit to you ?

However for voice-overs a multi-track DAW application (like Vegas or ACid) may be of more use that a multi-channel editor. Audacity is a sort of basic 'in-between' functionality application.

geoff

Message last edited on8/6/2008 7:30:49 PM byGeoff_Wood.
Subject:RE: Sound Forge vs. Audacity
Reply by: drbam
Date:8/10/2008 6:41:35 AM

Sound Forge won't improve the sonic quality of your recordings unless the included Sony plugins are better than what you are now using. Sound Forge does have batch processing but you can get 3rd party batch processing utilities for a lot less money if Audacity is working for you. Sound Forge is a great 2-track editor (ver 9 has been problematic though so many users have reverted to ver. 8). I use Vegas for VO work and do the surgical editing in Sound Forge.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge vs. Audacity
Reply by: rraud
Date:8/10/2008 8:37:07 AM

Like comparing apples & oranges. Audacity is great for the "price" if you don't have a multi-track app like Vegas, Audition, Sonar, or dare I say Slow Tools.
In addendum to drbm's post "problematic": While most of SF-9 early bugs have been addressed, some of the useful features and operations of SF-8 have been changed.. or dropped all together, hampering work-flow and aggravating users. However I find SF-9 to be more stable than SF-8 on my XP system. But not as stable as SF-6, which as far as I can recall, never crashed, and I used it almost every day for 8+ hours from the time it was released to the intro of SF-8. ( I skipped SF-7)
My 02 cents

Message last edited on8/15/2008 4:36:44 PM byrraud.
Subject:RE: Sound Forge vs. Audacity
Reply by: TLF
Date:8/12/2008 2:20:06 AM

The latest beta of Audacity has a new effect named Auto Duck that will automatically change the volume of music depending on the volume of the voice over track.

It takes a few attempts to master, but once you have, it's an invaluable tool.

What I really miss in Audacity is a vocal removal tool. GoldWave has one (although the resulting file is mono), the one supplied with Sound Forge Audio Studio is absolutely brilliant (leaves stereo imagery intact), and the one with Adobe Audition is quite good.

If Sound Forge Audio Studio had a noise reduction filter (a cut down version of NR2) I wouldn't hesitate to buy it.

Shame, though, that SF is not multitrack. For now I'll have to stick with Audacity and all its rough edges.

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