Hey Spot - I bought the SoundForge DVDs from Vasst featuring Jeffrey Fisher and I tell ya.....those DVDs are wonderful. I couldn't believe all the great stuff that SoundForge can do...it's amazing. I may have to look into picking up a few third parties plugins for it sometime in the future but for now....I'm still cutting my teeth with it.

I also emailed Jeffrey a question I had and he was very nice, replied quickly and was very free with his information. Between picking both you guys brains...I should be sitting pretty very soon :)

-d

If a Vegas audio track needs work I usually export to wav and then do the audio filtering in Samplitude Pro. I've never been happy with the sound of the audio effects in either Vegas or Sound Forge. To my ears they just don't have the openness and transparency that I'm used to elsewhere. And playing back multiple audio tracks flat in Vegas and then playing the same tracks flat in Samplitude is night and day as has been noted on many other forums.

I used to use Vegas for audio work (Vegas 1.0 through 2.0) many moons back but switched to Samplitude when I heard the literally jaw-dropping difference. I came back to Vegas for video work with Vegas 5.0 (and I love it) but still wouldn't do audio multitracking in anything other than Sampltude. A lot of Nuendo users have switched to Samplitude in the last year after hearing the openness and the definition of the audio mixing engine.

I come from analog pro audio recording starting in 1968 so I'm probably a bit over fussy about how my audio sounds though. I'm sure there are many circumstances where the Vegas or SF audio tools are quite satisfactory.

Trock:

If I'm doing mostly VO, location interviews, and music bed, are the Vegas audio tools up to the task, in your opinion? I'm pretty happy with the results I get in Vegas; then again, I don't know anything else.

It never occurred to me that one might need more than Vegas for a basic video project. If you're working with audio effects or instrument mixing, sure, I can see the value of SF. But for a basic corporate video edit, is there any significant upside in massaging the audio outside of Vegas?

Scott

I just downloaded iZotope - boy....this is one sexy program...and it has some very nice presets too!

I've found Vegas with the proper plugins to be as great as anything else for processing. If you want to get to sample level, sure you may export. Waves in Vegas sounds just as good as waves anywhere else IMO. And yes, izotope is great...a resource hog...but great! (try stacking 4 or 5 heavy duty waves plugins in a row and I guess you would have the same resource drain!)


Sean
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www.seancaldwell.com

You're right about Samplitude. Very good multitrack soft i have worked with a lot. What was remarquable for me was the way it sounded in realtime multitrack playback and general fx quality.

BTW, i guess it's a matter of dithering, jithering and algorythm, but i always found that a rendered stereo file sounds better than the multitrack preview. I never compared Samplitude vs Vegas in this regard, but differences where starling in the Saw plus days... I wonder if it could be a factor in your Vegas sound quality appreciation?

When using FX, etc., Vegas seems most efficient working at the track level. This is fine if all your audio is from a single source. However, if I'm working with audio from several different sources, I don't usually want to work with dozens of tracks. In these circumstances, I find it easier to tweak individual audio events in Sound Forge.

Sound Forge has a nice workflow (selectable region list, cutlist, etc.) and (I find) less distracting interface for working with single audio events. I also like the way it previews and loops FX from the FX dialogue. I've never gotten the hang of collecting noiseprints for Noise Reduction in Vegas, much easier to go into Sound Forge. I also use Sound Forge for recording from analog sources. I haven't used them yet, but I'm looking forward to using SF's clip detection tools, too, which aren't available in Vegas.

I think one of the nicest things about all the recent Sony updates is that Vegas, Sound Forge and Acid now all have the "save file path with media" feature. This makes it really simple to re-adjust complex sound files in their parent application from any of the other two applications, without having to start from scratch.

>>> I used to use Vegas for audio work (Vegas 1.0 through 2.0) many moons back but switched to Samplitude when I heard the literally jaw-dropping difference. <<<

Hmmm, I'm sorry but this is real cliched 'audiophile' BS. I have always used Vegas for audio-only and have edited mixed many extremely complex projects (50+ stereo trks, dozens of plug-ins, zillions of edits, etc) with extremely pleasing results, sonically. Hopefully creativity too ;) I open files in Forge from Vegas for detailed edits and tweaks and 'spot' offline processing.

If for a small second we do say that DAWs have sonic differences, you'll find everyone on the audio forum agrees that Vegas does indeed have a great sound. Having tried Samplitude a number of times, all I can say is yuck! I don't know how you manage to go from Vegas' elegant UI to the mess that is Samplitude...

Ben

Most of you that have posted are way ahead of me in both your audio abilities, and in the refinement of your discerning ears. However, speaking strictly from a mechanical viewpoint, as Spot already noted, if you need to do any serious surgery on a particular audio segment, Sound Forge really is the only way to go. You can do noise reduction, individual click removal, interactively. I'm not even sure you can manually remove a single pop or click from within Vegas.

You can't. Vegas doesn't have a drawing tool like Sound Forge does, and I use this ALL the time. At least once a week if not more often. that one feature alone, makes Sound Forge worth a lot.