Please compare Sound Forge Pro 11 vs. Audition

[Greg Miller]

Any comments about capabilities, especially audio processing and NR, between the two programs?

Thanks in advance!

[Seth Bloombaum]

I'm afraid I'm back on Sound Forge 7, I use it often, as well as Audition CC.

Audition has two interfaces - a destructive waveform editor, and a non-destructive multitrack DAW.

Sony has (in v7) kept a separation between those two functions - SFP is a destructive waveform editor, and Vegas is the multitrack DAW (as well as NLE). That was the start of Vegas - as an audio tool, and it's kept its outstanding sound capabilities.

To compare waveform editing between the two:
In the same league, IMO. Each has their idiosyncracies. I find all the Sony video/audio products faster and more intuitive than the Adobe equivalents... The interface just seems a little more mature and integrated. This is especially true for keyboard shortcuts. Simple tasks like shift- L or R arrow to select to one side of the cursor/playhead/CTI or the other, well in Audition it works only to the left, select previous. It's a niggling little thing that's easy to work around, but shift-select is an operation I use hundreds of times in cutting, say, 10 minutes of VO. E.g. to highlight and mute breaths.

I'm just obsessive about workflow for the numerous reptitive tasks...

OTOH, they are both great products that work well, with many minor differences.

IMO the Sony NR is easier to get good results with. But, as you probably know, any NR is only good for 10-25% improvements at best. When you've got one of those noisy reverb-y camera mic recordings you typically want 50 or 60% improvements, I haven't yet seen software that will provide it.

Download the eval versions of the softwares and try them out! Not sure if NR is included in which versions of Sound Forge, be sure to look at that.

You didn't ask, but I'd have approximately the same comments about the usability of Premiere vs. Vegas; mostly minor differences, but the fact that I've got a DAW integrated with my NLE in Vegas really speeds things along! Of course I've been using Vegas / Sound Forge over 15 years, and Premiere / Audition only about 5. Obsessivly pursuing keyboard shortcuts and speedy workflows. The fact that Premiere stops playback when you touch *anything* is very frustrating to someone who came up on Vegas....

To be fair, Premiere has been more stable over more varied platforms, much more than Vegas, which to editors with this or that display driver set have seemed like a series of unstable beta releases. Sony has lost a very significant minority of very vocal customers over this, which only got worse with GPU acceleration. Adobe's Mercury engine is excellent by comparison.

[Rick Reineke]

I tried Audition and could not get used to the interface.. but I've been a Sound Forge user since Ver. 3.0 (many moons ago) and Vegas since it's inception (which BTW was audio only). Audition is structured different for sure, but dound quality was not an issue and has more of one's A/D-D/A converters.
I'd prefer the SCS plug-ins if I had to choose between one or the other.. but I don't use many of the SCS plug-ins anyway, except for WaveHammer and the NR-2 suite.

[Don Palomaki]

I've used Audition since the Cool Edit Pro days and like it. Of course, Adobe in its infinite wisdom has made some unwelcome changes under their ownership.

I suspect it boils down to learning curve and integration with your current suite of products and work flows.

I use Edius Pro as my primary NLE, so that is not much of an issue to me.

[Ron Evans]

I also use Edius as my main editor though do have Vegas 12 as well as CS6. For audio I use Sound Forge 11 and Spectral Layers 2. Much prefer Sound Forge over Audition. I use Vegas for audio mainly as I too started with Vegas when it was only audio. The ability of Vegas to squeeze and stretch audio to allow clock sync issues is why I use and Sound Forge for final noise reduction etc. If I cannot get the noise out with Sound Forge I turn to Spectral Layers. If you want real control over noise reduction etc then get Spectral Layers. It will integrate with Sound Forge and also Vegas.

Ron Evans

[Rick Reineke]

Originally Posted by Don Palomaki

Adobe in its infinite wisdom has made some unwelcome changes under their ownership

Same with Sony Creative Software, since it's acquisition from Sonic Foundry) Around Sound Forge-5.0 or 6 as I recall) Though SF-5.0 was a milestone, offering real time preview and the plug-in chainer.
These days, I prefer Sound Forge Pro 10 to 11.
.. IMO, SCS really screwed-up the record and Plug-in chainer operation big time. As a SF-11 beta tester, I (and others) questioned these (bone-headed) changes, but SCS went ahead regardless.

[Ron Evans]

Yes I agree the record is messed up in Sound Forge 11 and I use Sound Forge 9 to record.

Ron Evans