Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio 10

In these days of technological evolution it is rather passé to focus on producing a basic audio editor. Video editing, movie making and music production software are fully capable of handling audio editing. This brings into question the existence of Sony's Sound Forge Audio Studio 10.

Sony Creative Software has itself pulled out of its bag of tricks amazing compositions like Vegas and Acid Pro that have very distinctive usefulness but why continue to update a basic audio editor when your core media production software can handle it all?  For the most part the answer looks to be simply because Sound Forge Audio Studio still has a throng of loyal devotees, and if anyone needs an audio editor without any bells and whistles, Sound Forge surely fits the bill. It's another thing altogether that those who've had previous versions of the software won't find many new features and tools with this update.

Sound Forge Audio Studio provides a variety of services including recording, editing and encoding audio on your home computer, compressing file formats and even converting them if need be. The software can record live performances in high-fidelity stereo sound and edit recorded audio to balance sound levels and even synchronise audio and video.

The software can also attempt to retrieve sound from old vinyl records and cassettes, though this is not exactly its forte. That said it is an improvement over what its predecessor offered. Dedicated software still recommended for proper restorations. Where the software does excel is with regard to effects where you can easily add effects to tracks such as reverb, delay and chorus. In this updated version of Sound Forge Audio Studio, support for audio resolutions has gone up from the standard 24-bit, 96kHz to 32-bit, 192kHz. This inevitably results in much better quality sound. Apple's AAC coding format is also now supported for import and export.

Another feature worth mentioning is the ‘Vocal Eraser' plug-in. This allows users to remove vocals from any audio track and isolate the background music from the vocals. This can see some ground when creating Karaoke mixes and when adding vocals to other tracks for remixing.  All other features seem as mere aesthetic improvements with no substantial fresh technology.

That said, Sound Forge Pro 10 - Sound Forge Audio Studio's bigger brother - offers a more comprehensive experience. The better time-stretch and pitch shifting algorithm in the Pro version is not available for Sound Forge Audio Studio. The standard version is also limited in terms of audio mixing; it doesn't allow you to chain effects together. For some this could be a serious omission given the product claims to be a focused audio editor.