I'm an audio engineer and have experience in both recording music, and
radio/TV advertising production. I'm a PC guy so my view is a bit
bias, but your first statement about the user interface was why I
decided to use Vegas for my own recording studio. Believe me I've
tried them all out for about a year to see which one I wanted to spend
the time with learning the ins and outs of. I've worked on Pro Tools,
AMS Audiophile, Cubase VST, Cool Edit Pro, Samplitude, SAW Pro,Logic
Audio Platinum and Cakewalk Pro Audio v9.0. For me Vegas beat the
other software hands down because it would be able to do everything a
client would ask me to do, plus it was very easy for me to figure out
how to do. Here's a typical advertising session what you'll run into.
You'll record 75 takes of a Voice over for a 60 Second commercial.
The client will ask you to assemble the whole spot using let's say
take #75, then they won't like how one phrase, so they ask you to
listen to other takes....no problem...goto the media pool window and
play that take which vegas automatically numbered for you. Client
says yeah I like that one sentence from Take #5...ok open take#5 in
the Trimmer window, select that sentence and place it into the
original take#75 where it goes. Then the client says yeah but in take
#5 I didn't like the way they pronounced the word "The"...let's listen
to some more takes for a better "The"..no problem they name the take I
hit play then open it in the trimmer, hit "S" for split on the
original event cut it out and slide in the new "The" which I drag from
the trimmer window. So then we get all done and we notice...damn the
whole commercial is now 62 seconds long instead of 60...well we have 2
options...listen to other takes for quicker reads or select the entire
VO Edit and hold the "Ctrl" Key and Time compress the whole thing to
60 seconds without effecting the pitch...something Vegas does
extremely well compared to other time compression programs. I now
laugh at the company I use to work for who bought 15 AMS Neve
Audiophile systems at $50,000 a pop and are limited to 8 Tracks and
can't do even a 10th of the things that Vegas can do and all my
ProTools Mac buddies....I laugh at them too when I show them how easy
Vegas is to work and how you can resize every window so you don't
have to squint at the screen to see something. So I really like
Vegas and boast about it all the time, except a bug in the program
occassionally creeps up like waveforms not drawing while your
recording and then all my MAC buddies will laugh at me. Now I'm not
even a video editor, but I upgraded to Vegas Video just to show all my
Video editing friends what the video editor can do without even having
to spend the time of rendering. The only thing that my friends have
over me is being able to use a control surface to do mixing and
editing, and also having on the fly automation, which would be a nice
addition down the line for Vegas. I have a friend who calls me every
other week telling me how I have to buy a Paris sytem, because it
sounds great and has automated mixing, and a control surface, and you
can keep building the system and it won't eat up your computer
resources. I say yeah, that's great but Vegas already does everything
I need it to and it didn't cost me $3000.00 and it also sounds great!!

Hope this helps, sorry for such the lengthy reply, but believe me when
I say...."I've Tried them all!!!"

brad hodgson wrote:
>>Hey guys,
>>
>>I own both vegas and cool edit, and am trying to decide
>>which program I want to use for each application. Can I
>>please get some opinions from some other people? I used
>>cool edit a time before purchasing Vegas and liked it.
>>Seemed to be very flexible, however, dont know much on its
>>credibility, recording quality, processing quality,
>>overall. I like Vegas a lot as well, very user friendly,
>>and seems to be very flexible. recorded a full multitracked
>>song for the first time the other night and was very
>>impressed. I jsut switched from analog to digital for
>>multitracking, not much if any midi applications, and have
>>an 8 track in and out M- audio 1010 d/a converter with an
>>ALesis 32 16 channel board. I would love to hear everyones
>>opinions on the softwares. Also, if anyone else has a
>>favorite software for multitracking purposes, Id love to
>>hear about it and why. Thanks guys!
>>
>>Brad