SF 14 Pro Disappointing for Digitizing Vinyl

Markvg360 wrote on 9/2/2020, 4:49 PM

I've been using Sound Forge Audio Studio 12 (ver 12.6 Build 356 64 bit) for years to digitize vinyl records (among other things). It has decent noise reduction tools and plugins, an MP3 ID3 tag editor, and an option in the Save-as menu to save "cd tracks" (based on markers) to individual files while converting to mp3 or m4a (aac) format. Find some album art online and, voila, you're all set for Plex or any other local media player.

I recently took the plunge and upgraded to Sound Forge Pro 14 (Ver 14.0 Build 111 64 bit). It has a lot of great capabilities, but is dismal at the simple task of digitizing vinyl. There is no tag editor. The closest thing is editing CD text in the tracklist. The biggest problem is that there is no longer an option to save the regions/tracks as separate files while converting the format. In addition, there is no longer an option to save as an m4a file. SF 14 is happy to open m4a files and it can encode aac, but it will only output the file as mp4 with no video. I have to manually change the file extension from .mp4 to .m4a. The only workflow I can figure out for now is to extract regions to get the track files, then batch convert them from wav (which I can only do to mp3 in any simple fashion). Pretty cumbersome.workflow.

Am I missing something, or is this task just too lowly for the professional version of Sound Forge? Glad I left my copy of SF Studio 12 on my PC.

Comments

Former user wrote on 9/2/2020, 5:40 PM

To me "digitizing vinyl (or shellac)" means ripping the medium to 24/48 or 24/96, doing some noise reduction, then saving the file. I don't think even Izotope RX will let you do more than that.

rraud wrote on 9/2/2020, 6:11 PM

SF Pro has both the legacy NR-2.0 restoration suite and iZ's RX Elements. MP3 ID tags can still be entered in the Save/as MP3> Custom dialog, same with batch converter. However I prefer the third-party stand alone 'MP3 Tag' editor. Exporting regions to files still works as well.

In the rare instance an audio CD is wanted, I still use the legacy CD Architect.