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All Forums  Cool Edit  difference between CEP 2.1 and SoundForge?

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chevysales Location: USA Posts: 15	Posted - Wed Jul 02, 2003 5:58 am  have used CEP 2.1 for sometime now and never paid attention to the competition (which may or may not be a good thing). with adobe in the picture (not that i am an adobe hater by all means)now and an uncertain future i will at least look at what else is offered, as i highly doubt there won't be big changes and IMO not for the better. one things for sure there webmasters have had enough time to fix the dead links and if they are not going to archive the pages they should have atleast removed the menu links cause i hate "file not found". okay enough of my ranting about the "little things". can someone give a CEP user some insite on SoundForge's similar application and objectively tell me the main differences. i do like cep and like it more after learning 2.1's interface. i am not a professional but do use it alot. i am not really overly concerned with cost differences as good applications to me are usally worth their respective costs. thanx, chevysales
Emmett Location: USA Posts: 59	Posted - Wed Jul 02, 2003 8:40 am  Soundforge is a good editor, despite other things you may hear from others on this board. We are all at least a tiny bit biased. In fact, the basic editing functions are quite similar to CEP's edit window. If you know CEP, the jump would be a fairly easy one. The problem is the loss of multitrack functions. You could also get Vegas, which has a MT, but not a very good one, and you would need both Vegas and SF to even come close to a product like CEP. If CEP dropped off the face of the earth, or simply became a terrible program, I would use Soundforge as a quick, basic editor. I know I'm going to catch hell for saying this, but I would probably go back to ProTools for most things. Or just continue using my current version of CEP. _________________ Emmett KPNT, St. Louis, MO
SteveG Location: United Kingdom Posts: 6695	Posted - Wed Jul 02, 2003 9:36 am  Emmett wrote: The problem is the loss of multitrack functions. You could also get Vegas, which has a MT, but not a very good one, and you would need both Vegas and SF to even come close to a product like CEP. If CEP dropped off the face of the earth, or simply became a terrible program, I would use Soundforge as a quick, basic editor. I know I'm going to catch hell for saying this, but I would probably go back to ProTools for most things. Or just continue using my current version of CEP. [bias] I looked at this earlier - I even tried, without success, to locate the few threads where we've considered the differences before. And I don't think that you are wrong in your estimate, and no, I don't think you'll get flack. One of the problems with SF is that recently, development of it slowed right down, and as you mentioned, it's not exactly an integrated environment. But SF's been taken over by Sony. Now, I don't know about you, but what Sony software of any note can you immediately recall? I actually recall some linear editing software that they had to withdraw... Sony is not primarily a S/W company, and I'd guess that they've bought into SF for somewhat different reasons than the ones Adobe had when they acquired Syntrillium. And so what it comes down to is that SF has a demonstrably weaker feature set than CEP, but that as far as it goes, it's not a bad editor - but it's not a particularly good one either. There are certainly others that I'd consider if I was looking around - like Wavelab, etc. But all of the others at this sort of level are twice the price of CEP, and the extras you get are usually pretty dubious. To get the full-featured version of SF you have to pay twice as much as you do for CEP, and it certainly hasn't got twice the features. CEP is intuitive, and it is a one-stop solution. It's not ideal for mainstream music-making - but neither is SF. So you have to figure out what you want it for. For instance, one of CEP's strengths is that it's really good for radio - which is why so many stations use it. But if you only want to do mastering work, or work on single files, you'll get by with SF. I know that this sounds terribly biased, and to an extent it is, but if you check out the feature sets of both programs (never mind anything else), you'll end up coming to the same conclusion, I'm sure. Apart from the multitrack capabilities (which have always been missing from SF), a better comparison could be made between CEP1.2 and SF, I think. But CEP2.1 just blows SF away... [/bias] The reason for no flack is that a lot of users here would regard this as a non-comparison now, and no sort of a threat at all. It rather remains to be seen what Sony do with SF - but there again, that also applies to CEP, I suppose. _________________
kylen Posts: 290	Posted - Wed Jul 02, 2003 10:35 am  I'm a CEP 2.1, Sound Forge 6.e, and Sonar 2.2 user. I can say from my perspective Sonic Foundry/Sony have fallen asleep on my audio products. Sound Forge and CD Architect 5. They work as well as they do (which is pretty good, I could comment on further given more time) until I try to apply my arsenal of DX/VST (wrapped) plugins. So from a support point of view there's a big difference. The multitrack view, group normalize (they have some kind of Batch thingy though), frequency band splitter are a few of the features about CEP I like that SF doesn't have. I'll put more in after work if someone else missed something... kylen
VoodooRadio Location: USA Posts: 3971	Posted - Wed Jul 02, 2003 11:49 am  Quote: If CEP dropped off the face of the earth, or simply became a terrible program...... I would still be using 1.2a and making money! _________________ I said Good Day! Voodoo
ozpeter Location: Australia Posts: 3200	Posted - Wed Jul 02, 2003 3:22 pm  There's some points of detail in SF that I like and wish Cool Edit had - the only way to determine whether a product is right for you is to download an evaluation copy and use it enough to determine whether all the points of detail add up, in your particular situation - if the overall thrust of the product doesn't put you off before you get that far. I have a version of SF on my machine but never actually use it - Ozpeter
Graeme Member Location: Spain Posts: 4663	Posted - Wed Jul 02, 2003 5:06 pm  VoodooRadio wrote: Quote: If CEP dropped off the face of the earth, or simply became a terrible program...... I would still be using 1.2a and making money! This is, indirectly, making a very good point, If the software application you already own is doing the job you want, why worry about what might/might not happpen in the future? For many users, 1.2a does exactly what is required, has no glitches and is rock solid stable. What more can you ask of any application? _________________ Graeme Don't forget to join the new CEP forum at audiomastersforum
beetle Location: USA Posts: 2591	Posted - Wed Jul 02, 2003 5:48 pm  SF 6.0 is much faster than Cool Edit. But that's where it ends. SF is quirky and it's complicated if you just want to do simple editing. Their dither and noise shaping sounds terrible. It's not very intuitive. It has fewer features than Cool Edit. It's just not built for editing or mastering like CEP is. No multitrack, as has been noted. The batch conversion is a seperate program, and even that has a few quirks. Their NR plug-in are not worth the money they charge for it. Sound Forge's pluses: The program has NEVER crashed on me. The plugs are easy for novices to use. The inclusion of Accoustic Mirror was the best thing they have done.
chevysales Location: USA Posts: 15	Posted - Wed Jul 02, 2003 6:15 pm  thanx to all for the excellent responses i do appreciate it.
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