As I’ve written, I am a user who got onboard with digital lo-fi production using some free version of ACID. Since I upgraded to 3.0 Pro at a time when Sonic Foundry was just throwing its products onto the market like it was a fire sale, I got Sound Forge for a cheap price. I also got CDArchitect, the Noise Reduction Bundle and the Batch Converter, all really cheap. So after updating to the first Sony versions, Sound Forge 7, I believe, I swore I was done giving Sony my money. Partially a principled stance for their part in the RIAA, rootkits and DRM disasters, and partially because it seem that what the updates mostly provided were the other parts of the Sonic Foundry IP re-branded and offered as incentive.

I recently relented and upgraded to version 9. Why? Well, apparently I’m not a principled person. Technically, the frustrations of ver. 7 were getting in my way (lack of custom key-bindings, poor plugin performance, various editing limitations), and none of the free alternatives are quite there in terms of interface and flexibility. And there were seemingly some other nice features that it looked like I could use, so I took advantage of the $99 upgrade offer. Already, it’s proved to be worth it.

While performing some edits in Sound Forge 9, I discovered this:

Previously when editing from the Process menu once that model window was open you were limited to its controls, and if you didn’t have the sample you were editing selected just so, you had to cancel out and start again. Or, more likely, undo and then redo. So pulling down the volume of a transient, or dropping a reverb on an ending, usually resulted in clicks at zero crossing of the sample edit region or one sample drop-outs.

No more. Thought the screen-cap below (click the image for full size) doesn’t show the mouse, if you roll-over the edit regions you can completely edit the fades and level right on the sample section. You can even tweak the edit region’s start and end points. Leveling out wild transients and normalizing small regions is a breeze. It works with a lot of the Process menu and Effect menu items as well as any plugin. So you really can do very percise audio editing small sample of audio and really get it right the first time.

It’s possible this showed up in version 8; I’m just discovering it now.

(Oh, and the audio in the screen cap is demonstration only. I wasn’t actually leveling the audio.)