Sonic Foundry Audio Anywhere

Reviewed by Tony Thomas

Sonic Foundry's Audio Anywhere package is a bundle of their popular Sound Forge XP

4.5 editor and their ACID Style loop-based music authoring program.   According to

information available on their website, Audio Anywhere is being positioned as a

complete toolkit for creating  presentations using programs like Microsoft 2000 (and its

Powerpoint application) and for web designers who would like to add audio and music to

their web sites.

 

The Audio Anywhere package comes with two CD-ROMs.  One contains Acid Style and

the other contains Sound Forge XP 4.5 and a library of 800 royalty-free sound clips:

music beds,  short musical themes, transitions, stingers, stagers and sound effects.

Acid Style is essentially a scaled-down version of Acid Music, a program that I reviewed

earlier for TechTrends (click on the link for the complete review). The biggest differences

between Acid Style and Acid Music is that Style only has eight available tracks for

composition (compared to unlimited tracks for Acid Music) and does not support plug-

ins.  In actual use, I did not find these limitations to be showstoppers.  I was able to create

very dense and interesting music beds with Acid Style in just a few minutes.

 

The program is simplicity exemplified in that you can create your own, totally royalty-

free compositions rapidly by just dragging and dropping.  For those who are musically-

challenged and don't have the bucks to spend on production libraries, this program will be

a lifesaver, especially if you needs are for rhythmic and synthesized beds.  Once you

complete a track, you can export it to a WAV file and edit it in Sound Forge XP.  You

can also export it to a 56Kb/sec. MP3 file in XP.

 

Sound Forge XP was also reviewed here previously (click on the link for the complete

review).  Version 4.5 adds looping tools for ACID, which are very helpful if you would

like to create your own loops.  XP is a very powerful and capable audio editing program

that enables you to easily create and edit your own audio tracks.  It has a number of

useful effects and processes including reverb, pitch bend, noise gate, dynamics, graphic

EQ, time compress/expand, distortion and delay/echo.  Although it is not a multi-track

editor, you can use the Paste/Mix command to combine two audio tracks (for example,

voice and music) into a single stereo track.

 

The included music and effects library is from Sound Ideas and the included tracks and

effects are very good.  Most of the music beds are electronica and :30 seconds in length.

It would have been nice to have a wider variety of musical genres and more :60 cuts.  The

stingers-stagers-sweepers are especially good.

 

I like Audio Anywhere a lot and I think it is a great bundle for multimedia producers and

web authors.  I also think that it would be a great package for radio stations, TV stations

and broadcast production since it includes an easy-to-use audio editor and music

authoring package.  You certainly can't beat its $99 list price.

 

For more information:

http://www.sonicfoundry.com

 

 

Copyright 1999 by Tony Thomas

All Rights Reserved

Techtrends 7/17/99

 

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