Anyone here used Sound Forge 8?

I've been using Sound Forge 8 exclusively for all my .wav trimming and editing for about 6 months now and I love it.

I don't use it for much else other than tweaking sounds or samples, and cutting them to the desired lengths (sometimes I use time-strech as well, but I have other stuff that IMO does a better job).

Here's a typical scenario for when I would use Sound Forge.
   
Let's say I'm starting a new tune from scratch, but I want to use the break from "It's Too Funky In Here" by James Brown. I'll take the CD with the original recording and rip it to a 44.1k wav file. Then I'll open up SF8 and import the file.

From here, what I'll attempt to do is isolate the break that I want to use. Prett y straight forward in SF8. I can usually isolate the break and get the loop perfect in about 2-3 minutes. I just trim it down to the break + 3-5 seconds on either end (so as to make sure not to accidentally cut part of the break). Then I zoom in and find the first beat of the break. I find the zero-crossing point, cut from there back, find the last beat, find the zero-cross, and cut from there to the end, leaving me with my break. Just turn on the loop button and play it to make sure it loops flawlessly. Fine tune, and BAM, save, and I'm done with this program.


From there, I will typically import the wav file into Recycle, and chop the break into smaller individual slices or "hits". (I love this program)

Save the .rx2 file, and then import it into Reason 3.0 in the Dr. Rex loop player. The break is now usable in the same way a regular drum kit patch would be, with each sound as its own note.



I'm sure you guys get the picture. But, my question is, do you think Adobe Audition 2.0 would perform this same task more efficiently? I've read alot about Audition and used to use Cool Edit Pro before the change. I really like the look of the interface, and am always up for trying new programs.

Any advantages to speak of specifically when comparing SF8 and AA2?

Since you are the only person who's mentioned any version of SF here for ages, I don't think that you'll get too many takers for this...

Audition gives you more possibilities, both in what it can do, and ways you can do it, than SF does. The reason that it gets used by so many radio people for edits is that it is intuitive, and quick, so I'd say that the chances of it being an improvement on SF were quite good, although I've never bothered with the comparison myself.

Editing itself is easy, and there are a lot of options for trimming. You can use automatic beat detection that can be adjusted in level to suit the track properties you've got, so there's no reason that I can see at all why SF should be better - and Audition has so much more to offer as well. For about the same price, you get a complete multitrack system with Audition, and that makes SF look pretty bad value for money, IMHO.

Thanks for your quick reply.

The only reason I was attracted to SF8 was because all the other producers I talked with mentioned that when the subject came up, so I never even looked into AA.

I'm not really concerned with "quick" and "intuitive" as being key selling points. I'm fairly computer saavy and don't really have much difficulty learning something a little more complex. Actually, more complex has usually been synonymous with BETTER in the past.

I just downloaded the trial of AA to see what I think. I'm gonna play with some of my classic breaks that I've already edited in SF8 and see how this compares.

It sounds like AA maybe what I am looking for. I feel that SF8 should be able to do more, but I've tweaked ever thing on the program possible, and never really yielded any positive results. Hopefully AA's bundle of tricks will be better.

Any loop editing I've done in Audition is seamless and very quick. You can adjust pitch, stretch time and tempo. It's good

With the Sony range of software you would need to buy more than one program in order to gain anything like the equivalent functionality to Audition. Think of Audition as a combination of Sound Forge, Acid and the audio part of Vegas.

Cheers

James.

As an aside, I checked to see if Audition imports Rex files but it doesn't. You can get away with .wav files however and these work fine. Working with Audition based loops is very intuitive and easy and at the end of the day, it makes sense to work with audio solely for the purpose of mixing down to CD.

Mark