Sony Releases New Upgrades to Sound Forge Pro and Spectralayers Pro

Sony’s two award-winning audio editing products have been significantly upgraded and are now designed to work together seamlessly.

Sony’s new Sound Forge Pro 11 software for Windows (MSRP £256.95) comes with a host of new features including a completely redesigned recording interface that allows for one-touch recording.

“A lot of people were asking for punch and roll recording… it’s something that people have been doing in different programs by creating scripts and other workarounds, but now with Sound Forge Pro 11 you can just jump in and do punch and roll recording on the fly. It’s super easy and on the fly. You’ll never have to run to the help docs,” commented Sony Creative Software’s sound development manager Mike Scheibinger.

Other features include: a new plug-in chain interface that gives direct workspace access to every element of the plug-in processing environment; CALM (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act) compliant metering; a new waveform display option; input bus effects; and broadcast wave file format enhancements.

The new version of the software also bumps up the number of included plug-ins from six to nine with the addition of new restore and repair tools as well as the Nectar Elements vocal processing plug-ins from iZotope.

For the first time ever, Sony Creative Software has released a full upgrade of one of their pro products in less than a year since its initial launch. Building on comments from users, the new SpectraLayers Pro 2 (MSRP £256.95) has been upgraded with significantly enhanced performance for faster spectral graph explorations; a new shape tool that is perfect for extracting drum sounds; new frequency range display options that allow you to see ranges plotted on your choice of logarithmic scales; one-click noise extraction that executes your custom noiseprint over the target layer’s entire spectral expanse; new resampling and remixing options; and a looping playback feature.

SpectraLayers Pro 2 is also now retina ready, which allows users to peer deeper in to the spectral graph by taking advantage of a Retina display-equipped Mackbook Pro.

The big story with the launch is the interoperability of both products, which are now available as the Audio Master Suite bundle (MSRP £385.95). Users working in Sound Forge Pro 11 who wish to edit a specific section of audio in SpecraLayers Pro 2 can now do so easily and with sample-accurate precision, bouncing audio files back and forth between the two programs.

“Sound Forge Pro 11 and SpectraLayers Pro 2 have arrived together in the form of a perfect pair, unified with systems for easy audio data transfer capabilities, resulting in a truly integrated solution for working freely across the waveform and spectral paradigms,” said Dave Chaimson, vice president of global marketing for Sony Creative Software.

Both products are now available for download from the Sony Creative Software website with physical products available 12 August.