Sonic Foundry Sound Forge Version 3.0 Sample Editing Software for Windows

Abstract

For years, DOS-based sampling editing software has been the only DOS music or audio program on my computer. I had long since made the transition to Windows versions of everything else, but I had been unable to find a suitable Windows sample editor. No longer. Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge Version 3.0 provides a complete set of sample editing, transfer, and conversion tools behind an easyto-use Windows shell. The program works with any PC-compatible sound card, and supports a variety of widely used samplers, as well as generic MIDI sample dump standard. Sound Forge uses the same visual representation as other programs of its kind, displaying audio waveform data in a window as either a single mono track or a stereo pair, with the left-channel data displayed above the right channel. The user typically selects a particular region of one or both tracks before performing any of a variety of operations on the selected audio data. Those operations include cut, copy, and paste, as well as numerous other editing and processing functions, including mix and cross-fade, time compress/expand, fade in/out, and equalization. The user can mark individual points within a sound file, or identify particular regions within a file and perform operations on a specified region. Sound Forge also supports playlist editing, though only within a single sound file. The range and variety of processing functions is at the core of Sound Forge's strength. It emulates a studio-full of signal processing gear, and, of course, does all its processing in the digital domain. The effects include amplitude modulation, chorus, delay/echo, distortion, noise gate, pitch bend, pitch change, reverberation, and vibrato, as well as such tools as graphic and parametric equalization, and four-operator FM synthesis. Each of the functions and tools incorporates an impressive amount of user control over parameter values, though many of the tools also offer default settings or predefined parameter options. There are so many tools and so many options in each, that in two months of intensive use I was not able to explore every one. Typically, the trade-off between hardware and software signal processing is speed, and Sound Forge is no different. On short samples, processing time for many operations is quite fast, though processing speed is determined both by the complexity of the function and the capability of the host computer. Running on a 80486 DX/2-66, a linear fade out over a 4-sec sample took approximately 2 sec. Adding reverberation to a 5-sec sample took slightly more than 12 sec. I used Sound Forge to edit and mix a long-form audio project, and clearly pushed the program to (and occasionally past) its limits. One of the limiting factors is hard-disk use. Sound Forge creates disk backups of each open sound-file window, as well as undo information and clipboard data. A single mix, for example, might require that several windows be open at once, so a large, complex mix can make tremendous demands on hard-disk resources. To its credit, Sound Forge does not set an arbitrary maximum number of sample-data windows that may be open at once, so the limit on the number of open windows is a function of the hardware system limitations. As I worked with larger files (up to 10 min long), processing times became correspondingly longer. Compressing or equalizing the file could take 8-10 min-not an inter-