Sound Forge 6.0 Upgrade [or not]

Can anyone convince me that I should spend $130 to upgrade to SF 6.0 from 5.0? I understand that 6.0 is faster, but other than speed what can I expect?

 

If you have 5.x, and you don't care about it being as slow as a snail, don't bother. But, if you are still using 4.5, yeah, you would do good to upgrade!

 

Ron,
As an example, if you have an hour long file opened in 5.0, and delete a little portion toward the start, it takes a long time to process as it has to save the entire file. It'll take many minutes, depending on the speed of your computer.

In 6.0 however, such an edit is instant. I believe it is simply saving the info needed about the edit itself, instead of resaving the entire file.

If you use SF in this way, you will save tremendous amounts of time and wonder how you ever could stand the earlier versions.

****

Grant,
I take it you are a Syreeta fan? That is a great album.

 

Stevie Wonder Presents Syreeta? Yup!

It WAS reissued by Motown several years ago but it is OOP and RARE! I just transferred the LP to CD-R.

 

Applying, say, EQ to a three-minute song with 5.0 takes about 4-5 seconds. [Of course, with my old 300 MHz computer it took upwards of 40 seconds or more.] 6.0 provides users with a 64-bit float--how will that help me over the 32-bit float available on 5.0?

Paul: I hear you about opening a huge, hour-long file and attempting to edit anything at the beginning. Even when processing an LP side, though, I've still got only 30 minutes max and even then I manually break the side up and save individual songs starting from the end of the long file first. All to say that speed alone is maybe not enough to get me to spend the cash.
Are there any other advantages that I should know about?

 

64-bit IS more accurate than 32-bit, supposedly, but it's nothing to worry about. 5.0 also has 64-bit processing, but SF plays it down to promote the new version.

Curiously, SF offers upgrade patches for all three versions. They know they have a user base that is comfortable whith what they've got.

Rontokyo, just download the demo of 6.0 to see for yourself first. You can run both on the same computer without problem. I do.

 

Ron,
I don't know if this is anything you could use either, but on SF6 you can zoom in on a point in your file all the way to 24 pixels:1 sample. SF5 stopped at 1:1.

 

Well actually, Paul, that may have value to me when manually declicking stuff sourced from vinyl. But tell you what, I'm going to take Grant's advice and download the demo and play with it for a while. Thanks to both of you.

 

Manual de-clicking is much easier and precise with Cool Edit, too!

 

It may be difficult to explain why you prefer Cool Edit, but could you? I really have no complaints with the SF as far as manually declicking goes.

 

Ron,

Using the spectral view, you can easily pinpoint clicks and other glitches and effectively interpolate them.

Cool Edit has the EASIEST interface for editing! Just drag the mouse to highlight and delete! No having to enter values or ranges. Cool Edit is also MUCH easier on the eyes too.

Hey, download a demo and see for yourself. you can't hurt anything. Right now, I have three versions of Cool Edit on this machine plus two versions of Sound Forge on it as well. I use them ALL. It never hurts to have as many varied tools at your disposal! I have each version of software configured specifically for certain types of tasks.

 

There are some SF softwares I use for mastering or de-lousing 5.1. For normal music and multi-tracking to stereo or basic stereo editing and such, I use Cool Edit, which is where I spend most of my time