A negative experience to share on Sound Forge Pro as a new customer that caused me to request refund.

I purchased and installed Sound Forge Pro recently and was greatly impressed. The program looks and is beautiful, apart from the dated floppy disc 'save' icons. It is choc-full-of tools that can help with audio projects for post production and sound design. On it's own, the program is fantastic. The manual also looked impressive. However, the problems started with the bundles, namely iZotope Ozone. iZotope RX installed and launched just fine. But Ozone had a troubled install and would not show up on the plugins menu. As a test, I opened Ozone in Reaper and it crashed it. Each time. I then looked carefully and noticed that Ozone dll (for Windows) showed up more than once, which looked like bad news. I uninstalled the program and re-installed. Same results. I then used the iZotope installer, same results. When I looked at my programs folder, I saw the program was littering my drives and it was not something uninstall could handle. Also, when I uninstalled Ozone, program are *still* there.

I reached out to Sound Forge Tech support and their response was, 'go ask Ozone tech support'. Well, I actually did that, and all iZotope did was describe how to access the plugins, they did not address the cluttered install and crashes. (This is after I carefully explained with a live chat rep at iZotope because I know SF takes up to a couple of days to respond.) Now, if I bought the plugins on my own and SF's response was, 'go ask iZotope', fair enough. But the software was bundled with SF, therefore, they need to take some responsibility. At the very least, contact iZotope on my behalf and follow up. Rather, SF passed the buck. Admittedly, this is a small thing. However, what if I had a real serious problem, what will SF do then? If SF was my company and my client encountered this issue, I would handle it much differently.

Just to share other companies' approach at problem solving. Black Magic Design will send a program to diagnose the problem to zip and email back. Adobe will send a program scrubber to remove all instances of the broken program to then do a fresh-re-install without colliding with fragments of a previous bad install. Why mention these companies? Because Magix is charging their rates.

The reason I took the trouble here is that I actually liked Sound Forge Pro and wanted to use it. Initially, I thought this was the fault of Magix, but know other departments, like Xara, went above and beyond when I had technical issues. THERE is a playbook to study and take notes from.

Yes, I was going to move on and forget iZotope Ozone, after all, it is only an entry tier product. But the response of SF eroded all confidence.