Community Forums Archive

Go Back

Subject:Sound Forge X Wish List
Posted by: porkjelly
Date:7/18/2007 2:14:48 PM

It's prolly better to start this list earlier than later, that way the Sony guys have time to throw some of these ideas around. I've duplicated many of the suggestions below from my past wish lists...some are major requests, others minor cosmetic ones.

01 - Dockable file panel. This panel would display a list of all open files and enable instant access to them, instead of having to click Windows > More Windows to open another floating window to scroll and find the file you wish to edit. I often work with dozens of open files simultaneously and it gets tedious to have to do lots of clicking and scrolling just to get to the file you wish to edit. This panel would also display various info about the file and can be sorted by various tabs. This feature seems like a no brainer, and those who don't wish to use it can X it out.

02 - Auto-update feature: Apply patches & updates automatically or manually from within Sound Forge without having to go and retrieve it from Sony's site.

03 - Ability to save window, toolbar, and icon layouts, preferences and customized shortcut keys. This would come in handy for those, such as myself, that reformat their hard drives more than once a year.

04 - Time Stretch: ability to manually enter a starting bpm and a target bpm. A gliding stretch would also be nice, similiar to the way a DJ will slow down the pitch *and* speed of a record from a higher one to a lower one and vice versa.

05 - Graphic Dynamics: ability to right-click on the grid and manually enter a specific value. Would be nice to also be able to add an exponential curve using two points instead of having to create one using several points.

06 - Graphic EQ: ability to add various fade curves. I almost exclusively use the iZotope EQ now for want of this feature, but their graph is so tiny!

07 - Batch processing: ability to select and delete multuple files using the delete key, click on a tab and sort the files accordingly, and save the list of qued up files for processing later.

08 - It would be nice if automated envelope points were given the option to snap to markers.

09 - Wider lever groove paths. I can't tell you how many times I've clicked above or below a lever for a whole decible change but instead get 0.1 dB. Sometimes this happens several times in a row and I have force myself to slow down and guide the mouse pointer almost inside the groove path. This can get frustrating, as I tend to work fast inside SF and ACID.

10 - How about an option to select some cool one-tone coloured meters instead of hot bright candy multi-coloured ones?

That's all I can think of for now. If anyone else has any suggestions to add, please do. Let's help make Sound Forge X the biggest and best Sound Forge ever. Yeah! o-)

Message last edited on7/18/2007 4:04:43 PM byporkjelly.
Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: jeffjams
Date:7/18/2007 3:13:06 PM

Good list! I could have used item 3 two days ago when I had to re-install SF9.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: Chienworks
Date:7/18/2007 3:17:21 PM

01 - Even just having the current display sorted by filename would be nice.

02 - Ummm, not self explanatory enough. auto-update what?

04 - Already there. Effects / Pitch / Bend or Shift. True, it doesn't handle BPM measurements, but with a very tiny bit of math you can accomplish the same thing. You can adjust pitch and speed, or just pitch or just speed.

07 - You lost me. I'm guessing you're describing several different activities you'd like to batch. I'm pretty sure most people don't start a batch processing session by deleting the selected files! But, assuming you do mean separate things ...
- delete: you can do this now and have been able to since, oh ... version 1.
- sort: you can do this now and have been able to since, oh ... when windows came out.
Keep in mind that selecting, deleting, and sorting are actually Windows functions. Sound Forge just uses the Windows premade functions for these operations.
- processing queue: you can do this now with scripting. ok, not for the faint of heart, but there are quite a few premade scripts available. take a look in the Sound Forge scripting forum.

09 - I feel your pain.

Message last edited on7/18/2007 3:19:22 PM byChienworks.
Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: porkjelly
Date:7/18/2007 4:01:30 PM

02 - Ok I modified my explanation on this one.

04 - A bpm window would be nice and virtually automatic. Besides, it's missing a gliding stretch feature. If I need the last minute of my song to slow from 130 bpm to 126 bpm, I could select it, enter the starting bpm and target bpm and it would do it gradually.

07 - I spose what I'm saying is that I would like Batch to work more like Windows Explorer, with tab sorting, multiple file deletion, etc. If I want to convert a folder of 150 files but there are two dozen I want to remove, I have to do it one at a time by clicking the Remove button with my mouse. Also, each time a file is removed, the window refreshes and brings me right back to the top of the list. I then have to scroll back down and search for the spot was at previously. I can get it done eventually, but it is somewhat tedious.

09 - I'm glad I'm not the only one who's experiencing this minor inconvenience. o-)

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: jeffjams
Date:7/18/2007 6:43:01 PM

I'm sure I'm wearing quite a hole in the welcome mat with my other posts -- but I totally agree that this version of Batch Processor does not work as efficiently as the old BP 5.0 when it comes to deleting whole bunches of files.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: Ben 
Date:7/18/2007 6:57:24 PM

>>> 01 - Dockable file panel. This panel would display a list of all open files and enable instant access to them, instead of having to click Windows > More Windows to open another floating window to scroll and find the file you wish to edit. I often work with dozens of open files simultaneously and it gets tedious to have to do lots of clicking and scrolling just to get to the file you wish to edit. This panel would also display various info about the file and can be sorted by various tabs. This feature seems like a no brainer, and those who don't wish to use it can X it out.

I'd LOVE to see this - I've mentioned this idea a few times here before. It's a pretty simple feature (effectively just floating the 'Window' menu) and for me, alone, would be enough to make me upgrade. Currently handling more than a few open files at a time gets very messy very quickly! As you rightly say, it's a no brainer.

What do you reckon, J? :)

Ben

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: Chienworks
Date:7/18/2007 8:27:28 PM

04 again ... yes, Effects / Pitch / Bend does that. It just doesn't say "BPM", but you can still handle it. Start at +- 0 semitones and end at -0.7, which is pretty close to changing from 130 to 126bmp.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: porkjelly
Date:7/19/2007 9:34:48 AM

Chienworks - ok I gotcha now. I currently use Audition to do this. I still would like to see a bpm feature on SF that did this. Thanks for the heads up though. Cheers.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: SHTUNOT
Date:7/20/2007 8:52:54 AM

Hardware control surface support...

ie: Mackie C4 support...this way I can tweak my plugin parameters with the knobs and not my mouse.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this makes it into acid 7. I already have a Mackie mcu and don't need a extender now...though a c4 would round off the mixing experience tremendously.

Hell even a midi learn feature would work for most. ie: right click a plugin parameter and select "midi learn" and move a knob on your midi device like a evolution UC-33e.

Ed.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: tomaras
Date:7/20/2007 11:18:06 AM

Batch Processor:

Would like to have control over batch processing of selected tracks of polyphonic files. i.e. I'd like to be able to normalize only one track out of 4, or normalize each track independently of the others in one batch pass.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: kbruff
Date:7/20/2007 12:33:55 PM

yes that would be very nice. It works this way in FLSTUDIO.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: porkjelly
Date:7/21/2007 2:32:06 PM

11 - A search box in SF's Explorer panel. o-)

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: PixelStuff
Date:12/9/2007 12:55:07 AM

I did some 16 track live recording recently on SF9 and have a few wishes based on that.

1 - it would be nice if the "enter" key didn't close the record window. We accidentally bumped the "enter" key on the numeric keypad once in the middle of a record session.

2 - it would be nice to resize the record window when recording more than 12 tracks to see them all at once. Currently with 16 tracks you get a scroll bar and must scroll back and forth to see them all.

3 - when a marker is placed from the record dialog, it would be nice to see text feedback that one was placed plus maybe a second counter showing the amount of time since the last marker was placed.

4 - a dark interface scheme would have been nice because the monitor was lighting up the whole booth more than any of the other devices. Something similar to the three color presets in Cinema 4D R10 would be awesome.


Message last edited on12/10/2007 1:08:05 AM byPixelStuff.
Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: tomaras
Date:12/9/2007 11:04:17 AM

I'd like the ability to batch normalize individual tracks.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: jumbuk
Date:12/9/2007 3:21:17 PM

"03 - Ability to save window, toolbar, and icon layouts, preferences and customized shortcut keys. This would come in handy for those, such as myself, that reformat their hard drives more than once a year."

More than once a year??!! Why would anyone willingly go through the pain of reformatting a hard disk even once a year? What is it you can't fix with defrag and disk clean?

Not to say the feature you request wouldn't be useful.



Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: Chienworks
Date:12/9/2007 5:11:37 PM

Defrag isn't necessary, nor even useful. In fact, it's actually a risk and can be harmful. It's a negative activity with no positive benefits. Don't bother.

For me a wipe and reformat happens about once every .... oh, i dunno ... i think the last 8 times i've ended up going 4 or 5 years on each PC and replacing it instead of reformatting.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: jumbuk
Date:12/9/2007 9:20:57 PM

Chienworks, like you I have never had to reformat my music PC, just replace it every few years. I generally carry the data drives across to the new machine (I say "generally" and I mean "twice").

Re defrag - I won't argue about risks because I don't have enough evidence one way or the other. I will say there are tangible benefits - I have seen it on my work PC, but I am not going to argue about it because I didn't raise it to become an advocate for defragging. My point was - what is he hoping to achieve by reformatting several times a year? If it is packing efficiency, that can be achieved by defragging (leaving aside the point about potential risks etc).


Message last edited on6/15/2009 9:33:17 PM byjumbuk.
Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: porkjelly
Date:3/24/2009 5:25:12 AM

So...any chance we'll see this one by summer? It's been almost two years since the last one, I think.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: Ben 
Date:3/27/2009 8:53:39 AM

The native pitch change and time stretch algorithms <desperately> need updating - pretty useless for most tasks these days; well behind the curve. Would be great to see this and such functionality is obviously a bread and butter task for an editor and the very old algos currently in Sound Forge just aren't up to the job for most work. Maybe Sony can incorporate the algos they licensed into ACID?

I'm also hoping on the dockable file window, porkjelly. Desperately needed.

Another request - the audio auto preview in the Explorer should be much faster. One has to currently wait around a second or so to preview a file - very slow for some reason.

I've been very pleased with the stability of 9 - first stable release for years. So whatever they do it's essential that doesn't change!!

Ben

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: Ben 
Date:4/1/2009 8:05:00 AM

Anyone else just see that tumbleweed go by...?

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: Phylter
Date:4/1/2009 9:43:57 PM

I would like the new Sound Forge to remotely run my dishwasher and diagnose any problems with it solely based on the sounds it makes.

Yeah, I'm not serious but it's April Fools Day and I had to get some of my no-so-funny humor in somewhere.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: porkjelly
Date:6/15/2009 10:37:29 AM

So...it's been two years. Any word?

Subject:RE: Sound Forge X Wish List
Reply by: jeffjams
Date:7/20/2009 4:04:52 PM

Hehey, Porkjelly! A little reunion of sorts...as I was just thinking the same thing.

After 2 years, I hope someone at Sony has not forgotten some of the improvements we asked for in a future update or upgrade.

I do coin-op game audio for a living, so I'm constantly reminded of how certain edit functions simply worked better in SF7.

A couple examples:

1. In SF9e, realtime previewing of effects does not work when a file or selected area is really short. Pitch shift previewing does not work for selections below 100 milliseconds; wavehammer struggles at 125 milliseconds. In SF7, I used to preview effect changes on the tiniest slivers of sound without a glitch.

2. I would challenge anyone at Sony to run a couple thousand speech files for a game through the old, pre-SF9 batch processor...then batch process same task in the SF9. Perhaps, then, you would begin to see why some of us are still complaining about the slowness and terrible ergonomics (for lack of a better word) of the batch processing function in SF9.

It's been strangely quiet...will there be a version 10?

Go Back