View Full Version : Sony Sound Forge 9 crashing


Ron Cooper
November 30th, 2011, 05:41 AM
I have been using S/F for quite a while but mainly on short clips from the Vegas timeline. However, now I am trying to do a 1 hour program & it just keeps crashing. So much so, that I cannot now load the file I was working on as the program crashes when I try to load it. I am at my wits end as I have waisted/ lost many hours over this and now have lost the project so it seems.

One thing I discovered was that in the Help/"About" it says my O/S is Vista yet I am running Win 7 64 bit. ??
Does anyone know if S/F 9 will run properly on Win 7/ 64bit ? I have written to Sony but they are slow to respond.

RonC.

Chris Harding
November 30th, 2011, 06:25 AM
Hi Ron

Prior to installing SF what OS were you running where the software ran well??? You can try to right click the desktop shortcut and click properties and run SF in compatibility mode ..ie: If it ran great in Win 98 then select Win 98 from the list ...it might help?????

Funny, I have a similar issue with DVD Lab in Win 7 64 bit.... in Win XP I could author an MPEG file of say 45 minutes long and it would compile the DVD with no issues at all!!!! Now in Win 7 64 with a LOT more memory I get errors with any MPEG2 file that exceeds 1GB...so any clip that's more than 20 minutes gives a problem unless I render it into two shorter segments!!

Just for interest, chop the file in half and see what happens???? It will probably work fine....Win 7 seems to have an issue with long clips obviously either audio or video with pre-64 bit software.

I'd love to know why too!!!! Save me having to cut up long wedding ceremonies!!!

Chris

Rick Reineke
December 1st, 2011, 10:37 AM
What format is the file? Does it contain video? SF in general has trouble with some codecs.. MP4s for instance,. Possible 'work around': Save the audio to the WAVE format, Edit and render to the appropriate audio format, and Mux the audio back to the video.

Ron Cooper
December 1st, 2011, 07:15 PM
Chris, you're a breath of fresh air with your knowledge.

I did not know anything about compatabilty mode until I looked as you suggested. I have been trying to get an answer from Sony re its suitability for Win 7 / 64. - (Still no answer from Sony after 6 days !! - So much for all their hype about how good their products are.)

As it ran previously on Win XP (SP3) on another machine, I am toying with making this (Win 7) machine a Dual boot one but as there are lots of programs/updates etc already installed I don't know whether I can do this without a re-format. However, I will try.

Meantime I selected win XP in the compatability mode as you suggested. However, I'm not sure if it will make a difference here from reading the "help" on this topic. I'll keep you posted.

RonC.

Ron Cooper
December 1st, 2011, 07:29 PM
Thanks for your input Rick. This file is from a poorly recorded MP3 (192 KBps) of a church service and is not part of a video. When I saved it in S/F it appeared as a wave file in Windows but after it crashed I could not open it in S/F anymore.

I then went into Win Explorer & found it would play in a few other programs so I tried importing it into another sound editor - Cyberlink Wave Editor, which worked ! I then re-named & saved it & imported back into S/F which workd !. So at least I haven't lost all the previous editing.

RonC.

Rick Reineke
December 2nd, 2011, 10:22 AM
I glad you were able to recover the files.
For future reference, when I encounter problematic files, I change the extension to <*.raw> and open it in Sound Forge Pro). I don't know if the budget version of Sound Forge, 'Audio Studio' will open a .raw file.

Ron Cooper
December 3rd, 2011, 04:09 AM
Rich, I am using the Pro version (Pro 9), but I am not familiar with .raw audio files.

RonC.

Rick Reineke
December 3rd, 2011, 06:23 PM
The .raw format does not need any headers, TOC, or other control data other formats require to play.

Ron Cooper
December 3rd, 2011, 08:13 PM
Thanks Rick, now I am wrestling with clipped Peak restoration.

When I select it in "Tools" & even taking the gain down to -10 with limiter, in the drop-down box, the preview still sounds the same apart from the gain drop. It as if the thing is not working. The selection is a church pipe organ recorded in MP3 @ 192Kbs and is clipped on the loud peaks.
What am I doing wrong ?

RonC.

Ron Cooper
December 3rd, 2011, 08:22 PM
Further to the previous post, I forgot to mention that when I check the "restored" section, although the gain has dropped accordingly, the clipping points, when examined in detail, are still squared-off, but off course at a much lower level.

I thought the flattened sections were supposed to be "restored", - that is rounded off so they no longer sound distorted.

RonC.

Rick Reineke
December 4th, 2011, 10:59 AM
I'll assume your using the Clipped Peak Restoration utility that comes with Noise Reduction-2.0.. Improvements on excessively clipped data may be minimal, but you still see a significant difference viewing the waveform shape. Perhaps your settings are off. If you can post a clip, I can check it out and possibly offer an opinion or option, or a CPR preset.
In addition, if clipping (distortion) is preamp/input stage related, for instance the common mistake of feeding line level to a mic level input, there's not much that can be done... even with a higher-end NR system, improvements are usually minimal.