Has anyone here used both Sound Forge on a PC and Peak Pro 5 on a Mac..?
How do they compare..?
From their respective websites they seem to have pretty much similar features, but Peak is twice the price. My boss wants to know which one we should get for an up-coming sampling project. I told him to get SF because I already know how to use it, but he asked me to check out Peak 'cos the studio has a Mac... The words "Devil" and "Deep blue sea" spring to mind here and I certainly don't want to start another platform war.
What we want to do is to create some sample sets of various ethnic instruments and we need a program that can fix sustained loop points into a WAV or AIFF file which can then be loaded into an AKAI hardware sampler for key-mapping. Also, a good dynamics processor (like SF's Wave HAmmer) is essential and I don't think the boss will want to fork out for extra plugins.
So, if any sound designers here are familiar with both programs, please advise.
Cheers, Andy M.
Sound editor question - Peak <> SF
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- KVRAF
- 2696 posts since 3 Aug, 2003 from Narnia
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 2696 posts since 3 Aug, 2003 from Narnia
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- KVRian
- 568 posts since 20 Nov, 2003 from Basel, Switzerland
I've been working every now and then with peak on the Mac since version 4 came out (because there wasn't really an alternative on OS X) and I think it sucks big time. IMHO it's not worth it to switch to a Mac just for that. If the studio Mac can still boot into OS 9 you could consider downloading sonicworx (which is free), otherwise I would stay with SF.
HTH
--th
HTH
--th
I'm the stereo chancellor
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 2696 posts since 3 Aug, 2003 from Narnia
Thanks for your reply tahome. Could you explain a little about why it sucks please? I mean is it the UI? Sound quality? Ease of use..?
Sorry to be pedantic, but I will need to tell my boss something other than "it sucks big time"... I have to justify my choice. I'm sure you know what I mean.
Cheers, AM
Sorry to be pedantic, but I will need to tell my boss something other than "it sucks big time"... I have to justify my choice. I'm sure you know what I mean.
Cheers, AM
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- KVRian
- 568 posts since 20 Nov, 2003 from Basel, Switzerland
I totally understand the position you're in.
Yes it's the GUI, or more general, the workflow. It doesn't really allow you to do things as you would expect - the waveform display is inaccurate for zoomed-out view because it's displaying some kind of amplitude envelope that is symmetric around the time axis. It has a long standing bug that prevents split stereo files to be opened correctly in some cases, it doesn't let you close a file as you play it back. Window behaviour is strange (for example, they are difficult to arrange sometimes because the waveform window doesn't respect the transport and tool bar and hides its title bar on zoom. And then, when you click somewhere to bring the window to the front suddenly some root-key dialog pops up out of nowhere, because that dialog was triggered by a single-click in an area that has no button or markings so you had no way of knowing there was something lurking there. Very counter intuitive). And sometimes I have the feeling whatever I do I get the error message "sorry you can't do that now, you first need to..." (convert sample rate, use a 24bit sound file, copy content to the clipboard etc.). You can't just save a stereo file as mono file, you need to mix the two channels first, delete one channel and save as, this kind of thing. It adds nonsense markers to the sound files (who in the world needs a "start" and "end" marker in a sample??) which gave me one hell of a trouble when I wanted to convert the edited samples for the Neuron synth (because it misread these nonsense markers as loop position) and I could go on all day...
Don't get me wrong, it's not that you can't work with the program. None of this really prevents you from actually working with it, but there are just so many little annoying things that add up to a *big* dislike after some time.
As for the DSP/sound part - it's ok if all you need is to normalize etc. You can use VST plug ins for the important DSP tasks but I would consider getting something else for really important things like time stretching and such because that isn't really good. I typically use timefactory which is a bit slower but a lot better. Same goes for the convolution reverb but that might just be the bad impulse responses (there are plenty of free ones on the web, very good ones at that. I guess that would be ok then).
Let me know if you want to hear me rant and rave about it some more
--th
Yes it's the GUI, or more general, the workflow. It doesn't really allow you to do things as you would expect - the waveform display is inaccurate for zoomed-out view because it's displaying some kind of amplitude envelope that is symmetric around the time axis. It has a long standing bug that prevents split stereo files to be opened correctly in some cases, it doesn't let you close a file as you play it back. Window behaviour is strange (for example, they are difficult to arrange sometimes because the waveform window doesn't respect the transport and tool bar and hides its title bar on zoom. And then, when you click somewhere to bring the window to the front suddenly some root-key dialog pops up out of nowhere, because that dialog was triggered by a single-click in an area that has no button or markings so you had no way of knowing there was something lurking there. Very counter intuitive). And sometimes I have the feeling whatever I do I get the error message "sorry you can't do that now, you first need to..." (convert sample rate, use a 24bit sound file, copy content to the clipboard etc.). You can't just save a stereo file as mono file, you need to mix the two channels first, delete one channel and save as, this kind of thing. It adds nonsense markers to the sound files (who in the world needs a "start" and "end" marker in a sample??) which gave me one hell of a trouble when I wanted to convert the edited samples for the Neuron synth (because it misread these nonsense markers as loop position) and I could go on all day...
Don't get me wrong, it's not that you can't work with the program. None of this really prevents you from actually working with it, but there are just so many little annoying things that add up to a *big* dislike after some time.
As for the DSP/sound part - it's ok if all you need is to normalize etc. You can use VST plug ins for the important DSP tasks but I would consider getting something else for really important things like time stretching and such because that isn't really good. I typically use timefactory which is a bit slower but a lot better. Same goes for the convolution reverb but that might just be the bad impulse responses (there are plenty of free ones on the web, very good ones at that. I guess that would be ok then).
Let me know if you want to hear me rant and rave about it some more
--th
I'm the stereo chancellor
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 2696 posts since 3 Aug, 2003 from Narnia