Sonic Foundry

Sonic Foundry (www.sonicfoundry.com)

Sonic Foundry develops sophisticated technology for creating, editing, managing, delivering, and accessing rich media.

Sound Forge 6.0

Sound Forge is Sonic Foundry’s award-winning, two-track digital audio editor. Sound Forge includes a powerful set of audio processes, tools, and effects for manipulating audio. This one-of-a-kind application is perfect for audio editing, audio recording, effects processing, and media encoding. Combine Sound Forge with any Windows-compatible sound card to create, record, and edit audio files. The clean and familiar Windows interface makes editing a breeze. It also has built-in support for video and CD burning and can save to a number of audio and video file formats, including WAV, WMA, RM, AVI, and MP3.

Sound Forge’s editing features provide a combination of over 35 audio effects and processes with more than 200 presets. It includes dozens of editing features, such as cut, paste, move, delete, mute, reverse, crossfade, trim, normalize, fade, pan, resample, enhance, insert silence, and more.

Sound Forge’s effects includes 20 DirectX Audio plug-ins, including XFX1, XFX2, XFX3, and Acoustic Mirror, which can be used for acoustic simulation and microphone modeling. The entire arsenal of effects includes amplitude modulation, chorus, delay/echo, distortion, dynamics, flange, gapper, noise gate, pitch bend, reverb, vibrato, time compression, Wave Hammer (compressor and volume maximizer), and more. Sound Forge also includes three EQs—graphic, parametric, and paragraphic—and supports DirectX plug-ins from third-party applications.

Sound Forge supports a wide range of audio formats, including 15 import formats—Windows Media Audio (WMA), OggVorbis (OGG), Perfect Clarity Audio (PCA)—and 17 export formats, such as WAV, Windows Media Audio, RealAudio, and MP3.

Sound Forge provides simple drag-and-drop operations and a customizable interface, allowing you to build projects the way you want. Sound Forge also supports standard Windows keyboard commands and mouse shortcuts.

Sound Forge includes auto crash recovery, which allows you to recover lost work after a power failure or system crash. Sound Forge also includes a powerful undo/redo history feature, which allows you to see your entire work history at a glance and undo unwanted edits.

New features for Sound Forge 6.0 include multitask background rendering, which allows you to work on one file while Sound Forge processes another; increased editing accuracy, which permits editing down to the sample level; and new video render options, including fast video resizing, source video resampling, and video stretching.

Platform: Windows 98SE, Me, 2000, or XP

List price: $499.95, packaged: $399.96, download: $349.97

ACID PRO 4.0

ACID PRO 4.0 is an award-winning, loop-based music creation tool that allows you to produce original, royalty-free music. ACID PRO can create songs, remix tracks, develop music beds, score videos, and develop music. It is intuitive and easy to use, works with hundreds of loops in multiple genres, uses unlimited tracks of audio, and imports complete songs, even MP3s. It has built-in support for MIDI, video scoring, and can save to a number of audio and video file formats, including MP3 (MP3), Perfect Clarity Audio (PCA), Video for Windows (AVI), QuickTime (MOV), OGG Vorbis (OGG), and new export formats such as RealVideo 8 (RM) and RealAudio 8.

With ACID PRO, you can adjust the volume and panning for each track, alter effects over time using volume and track envelopes, apply fades and transitions, create amazing drum fills, combine music loops with existing songs, and even apply effects on tracks, buses, or in assignable effects chains.

ACID PRO includes 20 DirectX audio plug-ins from Sonic Foundry’s XFX 1, XFX 2, and XFX 3. It also includes effects such as amplitude modulation, chorus, delay, distortion, flange, noise gate, reverb, and more. ACID PRO also includes three EQs—graphic, parametric, and paragraphic—and supports third-party DirectX plug-ins.

ACID PRO includes a music content CD containing more than 350 multi-genre music loops and dozens of projects from Sonic Foundry’s Loops for ACID collection, including genres such as dance, hip-hop, techno, industrial, pop, rock, jazz, ambient, orchestral, and more.

ACID PRO supports MIDI and DLS (downloadable sounds) files. MIDI files can be played using external or internal MIDI sound sources, including DLS files, through the DirectX Soft Synth. MIDI tracks time stretch perfectly to any tempo and can be rendered with effects just like audio tracks.

ACID PRO Beatmapper remixing tool and Chopper editing tool

ACID PRO includes features such as the Beatmapper remixing tool, Video scoring track, and Chopper editing tool. It has a powerful new effects model, 32 effects per track, 32 effect chains/26 buses, sample rates up to 192 kHz, 12 new DirectX audio plug-ins from XFX2 and XFX3, MIDI record and playback, MIDI file support, DLS sound file support, CD ripping/CD extraction, master, track, and assignable audio effects, attack, sustain, and release (ASR) envelopes, track envelopes to lock to events, Vegas Audio LE multitrack editing software, and user interface enhancements.

Platform: Windows 98SE, Me, 2000, or XP

List price: $499.95, packaged: $399.96, download: $349.97

Vegas Video 3.0

Vegas Video 3.0 is a digital video editing system that provides all the integrated tools and high-quality output options that you demand for your production environment. Vegas Video 3.0 offers support for all OHCI-compatible IEEE 1394 DV devices, from consumer to professional, whether the final project is DV, MPEG-2 for DVD, streaming media for the web, uncompressed D1 for broadcast, NTSC or PAL, or a Red Book CD master.

Platform: Windows 98SE, Me, 2000, or XP

List price: $599.95, packaged: $479.96, download: $419.97