Personally, I think it can all be done within Vegas. But there are probably some faster methods for a price.

All you need is Vegas, but I also use Sound Forge for recording voiceovers. It's just the way I like to work.

Terry

ok, i think youre getting a lil confised here, although u can edit soud files in SOnar, its not exactly a wave editor, its a sequencer, specificllay designed to sequence adio and midi

Soundforge and Audition are very similar, however audition takes afew elements from Acid and throws them into the bag as well.. IMO, audition has nothing on soundforge with regard to grunt and actual real world FAST workflows although on the outset, audition does seem to have afew extras thrown in to sweeten the deal, but then again, u gotta understand that audition is a total rehaul of cool edit pro... not a bad program, but if you have vegas, u dont need it..
as for vegas, most of what u cn do in soundforge can be done in vegas, however there are some fundamental differences, mostly being with synthesis, and direct frequency manipultion. all teh same plugins etc can be used, but for voiceover work, there are afew things to keep an eye out.

IMO, the first thing ANYONE should buy is the noise reduction plugins from SonicFoundry(sony) these come with soundforge (as well as CDArchitect) from there, teh steinberg vynil restoration plugin would be a close second (another noise reduction plugin)
from tehre, i woul drecommend Waves native pro fx pack, the beatmodel packs as well as the timeworks mastering pack (for those tricky EQ jobs)
There are loads of plugins available, and im sure many people hav their preferences, but these work for me.

By the way, i use soundforge and Vegas exclusively now, and havent looked back since the soundforge XP days...

oh another thing, is that u can create multiple takes of your sound by opening the audio element of your video (from a vegas timeline) in soundforge, tweak till your happy, then that new take is automaticaly synced, u can the switch takes as needed...

I own Sonar 4, Soundforge 8 & Vegas 6. That should tell you something. :-]

I would agree heartily with most of what has been said. I also looked seriously at Audition when I was searching for a WAV editor. It felt slow to me (compared to SF) and I found the UI and work flow to be very foreign to my way of thinking and working. Adobe and I don't get along very well - the prog's to are too big, to slow (esp to load), etc. for my taste.

Sonar = sequencing (i.e. audio & MIDI together in time), FABULOUS effects & mix routing, great busses, good integration of plug-in effects & instruments

Vegas = wonderful video, a nice alternative approach to multi-track audio, much better tools for certain types of film/video related audio and soundtrack work

Sound Forge = wav edits - detailed and hard core, noise reduction, mastering tools, etc.


When I edit for multi-track acoustic recordings, I always use Sonar. I like the UI design for working with LOTS of tracks and takes. Plus the bussing structure is very helpful for effects and such. Sound Forge integrates into Sonar gracefully and does exactly what Sonar CAN'T do for audio edits.

My biggest beef with Sonar is that its timing grid is based on a bars-beats-measures MIDI philosophy, and I've had trouble when trying to do detailed audio edits (multi-take comping) along side MIDI tracks that involve tempo changes. [If anybody REALLY wants to know...wander over the the Sonar forum and search for "Mute tool bug". My screen name there is the same as here. You'll find out more than you ever wanted to know...] Basically, for working against a real-world clock there are times that Sonar trips itself. As you can imagine, this makes for some problems when working with a video track. Some of the may be fixed in Sonar 5, but I bought Vegas to cover my video needs. So it's a moot issue for me now.

SUMMARY: Sonar is probably way more than you need for voiceover work. (It also had some issues reading certain types of video files.) Sound Forge will do the trick, as long as you don't need to multi-track. It's easily the most powerful for audio waveform manipulation & noise reduction. Vegas is probably the most flexible overall for your purposes.

hi - hey thanks *very* much for the helpful insights ... all makes a lot of sense. I started off w/audio using cool edit pro, for many years, and really liked it .. then upgraded to audition, which I've used lately... it's ok, but doesn't have the same advanced audio editing features of vegas or soundforge ... so trying to figure out what's best.

I'm looking at the audio v/o plugins in vasst.com's ultimate s 2 for V6, they look helpful, and also learning how to use vegas' built in audio features better, it looks like a very solid audio toolset, in vegas...

trying sonar LE because it came bundled with the UA-25 interface box, but it looks more like something for midi sequencing vs v/o, audio/video editing...

I'm finally trying V6, but did what someone here suggested and didn't let it install media manager (due to all it's problems, plus I don't want mssql running on my pc taking up memory, and I change media drive letters etc a lot, so it wouldn't work well anyways), and so far that's working fine.

thx for the ideas re plug-ins, I'll check those out too ..

appreciate it!

ken

Ken,

If you truly want "what's best for voiceover work/CD production/cleaning up audio tracks for DVDs?" - do not discount Wavelab 6.0. My company is strictly voiceovers and while I am a happily licensed Vegas user (and was - up until Forge 7.0) a big fan of Forge - Forge has become quite a buggy affair that seems to get little to no love from the Forge dev team.

For the full story on Forge, pop over to it's forum and read up on some of the issues. I am not sure how deep your editing will go but while Forge is more than capable for simple stuff...Wavelab 6.0 is truly is in a class by itself for all kinds of audio tasks. Fast, elegant and very well thought out. Very well supported too.

Cheers!

VP