The Mac version of the Sound Forge Pro audio editor has always lived under the shadow of its older and stronger Windows sibling, and previous users of Sound Forge Pro Mac complained of stability problems and too few features. It looked as though the program was going to die on the vine when Sony abandoned it, but Magix took many by surprise when it assumed ownership of the Sound Forge line in 2016. Now, after a few years of waiting, there is finally an update.
With its solid features and functionality, plus some tasty iZotope goodies, the latest Sound Forge Pro Mac is the best yet, despite falling short of its Windows sibling. Feeble right-click menu. No cheaper sans-iZotope option. Frustrating manual. With Sony unwilling to put any great resources into. Sound Forge Pro Mac 3 is an audio editor and processor that incorporates a highly customizable single-window architecture. While the look and feel of the application isn’t necessarily bare-bones, it is still a no-fluff application that doesn’t have a host of unnecessary options or excessive menus.
Sound Forge Pro Mac 3’s customizable interface showing both audio editors with both tabs open—the Media Browser on the left and the Plug-in Choose and Chain on the right.
With Sound Forge Pro Mac 3, Magix has not tried to reinvent the wheel. The look and feel of previous versions remains largely unchanged. Instead, Magix has shored up the program’s stability and added some key features, as well as third-party mastering/restoration processing from iZotope, without sacrificing the program’s streamlined workflow.
REINTRODUCING THE CHALLENGER
Sound Forge Pro Mac 3 (SFPM3) offers a very flexible one-window interface with four panes of operation that can be hidden from the toolbar to suit the user’s needs. The main Editor pane can show either two separate waveform editors horizontally or vertically, each with a preview waveform above, or a single editor. The left, right, and bottom panes can each hold a variety of tools such as the Media browser, Record settings, Channel Meters, Plugin Chooser for all your system’s AU and VST plug-ins, and a Plug-in Chain view, where you can design, save, and load custom plug-in chains.
This version supports recording of up to 32 channels simultaneously as high as 24-bit/192kHz resolution, but the program can open, edit, and save audio as high-res as 32-and 64-bit (floating point)/192kHz in almost every major audio format. The update can also import and convert video files to audio only, which you can edit and export. Many video formats like MP4, XAVC, AVCHD, XDCAM and others will work; a few videos formats such as MKV would not open.
Fig. 1. The bundled batch convertor, Cnvrt, adds metadata, and processes and converts the audio files’ format in a hurry.
SFPM3 performs excellent pitch shifting and time stretching (using the Zplane élastique processor), as well as professional sample rate and bit depth conversion using the iZotope Mbit + Dither and 64-bit SRC plug-ins. All of SFPM3’s processes are also available in the included Magix Cnvrt 1.0 audio batch convertor, which works very fast (Figure 1).
Fig. 2. A single key creates Regions of the selected audio, shown in the Regions List on the left. Another command exports all the Regions as separate audio files.
SFPM3 provides a number of keyboard shortcuts that you can customize in Preferences. Using those you can mark many separate regions within a single audio file quickly and then export them all to separate audio files at a single stroke (Figure 2). I loved that feature for vocal takes, as well as long found-sound recordings. SFPM3 has the requisite tools, effects, and process to perform accurate editing down to the single-sample level, and it does so with very smooth operation and low CPU load, even with many high-res audio files open.
NEW TRICKS FOR THE TRADE
Fig. 3. iZotope RX 6 Elements includes a simplified, standalone spectral editor and four very effective noise reduction plug-ins for use in Sound Forge Pro Mac 3 or another host.
Many of the new features of SFPM3 focus on delivering your audio appropriately for many uses and destinations. It includes iZotope Ozone 7 Elements, a preset-driven mastering plug-in designed to produce fast results for more than 20 musical genres. The included RX 6 Elements processors make up two-thirds of the iZotope Elements Bundle and includes a basic standalone spectral editor (Figure 3) along with four plug-ins: De-click, De-clip, De-hum, and De-noise. SFPM3 also has a new automatic clip detection tool in the Find/Repair view, where you can attempt to quickly repair clips, peaks and glitches.
A new Automatic Loudness Leveling function immediately attenuates levels to be in line with broadcast standards of the AES/EBU or the ATSC CALM Act. Detailed Loudness Meters show the audio’s momentary, short-term, and overall loudness, as well as the loudness range. In addition, SFPM3’s dynamic rendering can process multiple project files including the source audio with unique plug-in chains as they’re being burned to a Redbook standard CD, so there’s no need to render pre-master files.
The newly added Preview Mastered for iTunes option will encode and export any selected audio using the same technology that Apple uses for the Mastered for iTunes standard. While it’s just a preview, because Apple does the final encoding on its end, this Sound Forge option is very handy for hearing how iTunes will step on your pristine sound, so you can try to make adjustments before sending it off. However, Preview Mastered for iTunes doesn’t work if your original audio is already compressed. It would be great for future Sound Forge Pro Mac updates to add other previews for other popular streaming/compressed platforms.
MORE HIGHS THAN LOWS
Sound Forge Pro Mac 3 operates very quickly and with far less CPU than you might expect. Of course, you can bog it down if you’re recording more high-res tracks than your computer can handle or by using too many plug-ins at once. However, I was able to keep way more 24-bit/44.1kHz WAV files open and active than I at first thought was a good idea on my aging MacBook Pro.
While SFPM3’s performance was not flawless, it did seem far more stable than previous versions. This update crashed on me only a few times in two different ways. The first was while using keyboard shortcuts to record successive short clips of audio quickly, which worked fine many times and crashed two or three times. The second instance happened when attempting to cancel a Preview Mastered for iTunes encoding that was in process. And when it did crash, I only lost a little time, but not the work since SFPM3 restored my session upon reopening.
SURVEYING THE OPTIONS
Mastering and post-production engineers, as well as other audio pros have an obvious need for dedicated audio editors such as this. Electronic musicians and producers may not see the point unless they can divine the benefit of Sound Forge Pro Mac 3’s workflow compared to other DAWs. However, anyone who commonly treats audio like Play-Doh—recording, editing, and processing it without inhibition just to see how it turns out—will appreciate the speed with which you can render new versions of high-res files, export multiple regions, and batch-convert using custom-saved plug-in chains. And it’s priced very competitively if Magix can keep it at its current $299 level. (It’s listed at $557 retail, which would put it right in line with many other DAWs.)
With its ample power, smooth workflow and reasonable price, Sound Forge Pro Mac 3 belongs in the conversation for any Mac user looking for a versatile digital-audio workstation.
STRENGTHS
One-window interface. Light on the CPU. iZotope plug-ins. Batch processor. High-quality audio engine. Supports most audio formats and resolutions.
LIMITATIONS
Little use of contextual menus. Batch processor not integrated with editor. Video support limited to extracting audio track.
$299 street
magix.com
Pnp Pro 3 Key Officers
Markkus Rovito dislikes the sound of his own voice until it’s processed with audio hardware, software, or his own built-in dialect filters.
SOUND FORGE Pro Mac 3 is a tool to edit and process audio in a very detailed manner – whether it’s audio recorded directly into the software, or opened from a pre-recorded file. Sometimes the DAW you work in just doesn’t give you enough detail and depth to get as surgical as you need, and this is where software like SOUND FORGE Pro steps up. SOUND FORGE Pro Mac 3 is also a great audio overview tool – providing options to master your finished tracks powerfully, batch convert files, meter loudness to commercial standards and tools to create great redbook (pre-production) CD images. All of this potentially falls outside the scope of DAW software, and so SoundForge Pro can provide a useful partnership to ensure your sound is pristine from creation to end product.
Interface
SOUND FORGE Pro Mac 3 looks good. It’s austere and sparse; not overly impressive looking. But it’s clean, and functional. When you’re diving into audio files to find and correct issues, you want to be able to see what’s going on quickly. And with this software you can. The main waveform(s) image takes up most of the GUI, and is clear and easy to see. As you zoom in the clarity continues, right down to sample level.
The customisation of the interface is good, with options over where to place a variety of useful informational windows, such as plugin lists, channel meters, file system, recording levels. You have control over where on the page to place them, and key commands to introduce and remove them. There is an option to edit multiple audio waveforms side by side or on top of one another, to give quick workflow and comparison windows.
Tools
The standard audio editing tools prevail; fades, trims, normalisation, gate, reverse, time stretch etc. Magix have smartly teamed up with Izotope, and offer RX and Ozone Elements bundled with SOUND FORGE Pro Mac 3. These software packs provide a variety of professional quality audio processes available from within the Ozone and RX collection. If you’re not familiar with either of them, check our linked reviews. They are industry leaders in audio correction and processing. To have Izotope products included in Soundforge is a very astute move. Part of their collaboration is the inclusion of Izotope’s excellent Dither and sample rate conversion algorithms.
Loudness
This is an often overlooked, yet essential element to the music creation process. Whatever platform you’re releasing your music onto, there will be standards that you need to adhere to in order for your music to be accepted, or at the very least, not processed further by 3rd parties who won’t care what it sounds like. If your music is too loud for Spotify, or Apple music, for example, it will get processed, or just turned down. The old days of Louder is Better, is over. For television, or film, there are average loudness standards you need to adhere to. Soundforge provides a bundle of loudness metering options that cater to all those needs, including measuring average or integrated loudness using LUFS industry standards. I particularly liked the true peak meters; meters that measure the inter sample peaks, showing if the sound peaks between sample measurements. Now that the loudness wars are being won by the dynamics side, and there is more room for dynamic differentiation, loudness meters are becoming more important again. SOUND FORGE Pro Mac 3 has you covered. When you’ve finished mastering your track, and have printed it to the specs you want, you can double check by printing a loudness log, that gives all the necessary information needed for that track.
Cutting the Glitch
More often than not, glitches and clicks are sounds you don’t want in your finished product. When you’re not intentionally adding them, they can be a pain to source and clean up. I typically use software like Soundforge to clean up my audio before adding it to a project. Soundforge provides several methods of locating and cleaning up glitches and those pesky digital clips. Find/repair will automagically run through the audio and locate clicks and glitches. You can adjust the sensitivity, so it isn’t picking up claps or snare hits, for example. You can then repair them all with a click of a button, with different methods of healing, from copying the alternate channels audio, interpolating, or replacing with audio data immediately preceding. If the automatic process doesn’t suit, there is a pencil tool, that enables (with a great deal of care) you to draw the waveform in, smoothing any hard shelves that cause clipping. I loved this about my old audio editing programs, and I love it about this software. Failing all that, the RX elements bundle contains an excellent de-clicker and de-clipper from Izotope. So when it comes to glitches and clicks, you’re well covered.
Chaining
Magix provides a few effects to further process your sound. SoundForge Pro also comes bundled with the aforementioned Izotope elements plugins, which contain several useful modules for audio correction and processing, such as de-hum and de-noise, for removing pesky glitches and whirs that you just don’t need on your audiofile. However the real power comes with the knowledge that you can load in your own AU’s and VSTs. This gives your entire processing collection access to sound forge. Moreover, you can also make a chain of plugins, and save as a preset, so if you’re batch processing files, and need the same plugins running through sound forge for each file, this will cross out hours of tedium, potentially. Another interesting element of the plugin chain is that you can automate the plugins you’re using. Select the VST or AU. and in the list of automatable parameters, turn on the ones you want to use, and click and drag the envelope created to shape the automation. Clicking creates nodes in the envelope, and right clicking gives you curve options between points. I did find that Soundforge seemed to crash when using certain plugins (Soundtoys did not play well), especially when trying to automate. So make sure to SAVE!! The chain setup of using and automating your own plugins is extremely useful, however, and is an excellent addition to the software. If the processing chain is fairly straightforward, and you don’t have to listen to each file, you can open it up in another software bundled with SoundForge Pro, called Convrt, and use that to batch process multiple files using the same plugin chain, cranking up the efficiency even higher.
Master
SOUND FORGE Pro Mac 3 gives you the ability to master tracks well. they’ve included a couple of mastering plugins of their own, however I would recommend if you’re serious about mastering, find and use some 3rd party plugins built specifically for that purpose. Magix’s Wavehammer plugin; a combo limiter and volume maximiser worked pleasingly, I thought. Fairly transparent, so in a pinch, I’d throw that on a track to level it well. From there, you can open all the tracks you’ve worked on, select the order and metadata in the track listing, and burn the entire selection to a CD image. You can also archive the image if you’re working on someone else’s project, and need to keep an archive. Simple, and effective!
(Key) Commander
These are essential to a speedy workflow. SOUND FORGE Pro Mac 3 has the basics; the large scale overview, and what is there is great – movement around the file, setting time point markers, zoom controls; these are all great. But I kept looking for something that’s a bit deeper – some of the basic processing tools have no shortcut – fades, reverse, normalise, gain change etc. These are tools that are being used constantly when editing audio, and to have to menu dive for them is frustrating. What would be killer here is a key command customisation option, as in Logic – so you could assign whatever key commands to whatever processes you wanted. When it comes to the key commands that do exist, do NOT trust the manual – it is not correct in some circumstances.
Conclusion
SOUND FORGE Pro Mac 3 is a great audio editing software for MAC. Being a small market, there’s not too much competition out there. But I feel that Magix shouldn’t rest on its laurels because of that. It’s super clean, and processes audio quickly. I felt that it was missing a few things that would help speed editing immensely, and I became frustrated at the lack of them. namely; KEY COMMANDS.
Menu diving is so 2010. I want to access all the tools on the window immediately, to keep my flow going. Having to select a segment of audio, then go to a menu? I feel this is a big gap in the workflow process of soundforge3.It also felt a little shaky stability-wise every now and then. Certain plugins crash it, and selecting too big a repair window (in find/repair) will crash it. However, it is in software infancy, and is showing a lot of promise. The software has recently been bought out by Magix, so I have hopes for improvements and updates from here on out. I miss my old BIAS Peak, and sound designer II, so if this keeps going in the same direction I’m in!
Sound Forge Pro 3 For Mac Manual 2017
Soundforge Pro 3 for Mac costs $249 (discounted at the moment from 449), and is available here.