Soundtrack Pro 3
First, thanks very much to everybody who donated recently to EP — your support has helped, among other things, to pay for upgraded audio software. From the beginning I've been using Apple's Soundtrack Pro which, as the name implies, is for professional use. It's a pretty good tool. When I first got STP Apple sold it as a stand-alone package; later they folded it into the set of programs that make up their Final Cut Studio. Expensive, even to upgrade. I'd already upgraded once, to where I was working with STP 1.5, but that was getting fairly long in the tooth and I figured the latest version might work a little better with Snow Leopard or at least be more suited to the coming transition to 64 bit processing. Also I like to upgrade software regularly even when what I'm using works. But upgrades across a several version spread aren't always easy. The short story is that everything appears, after a fair amount of testing and too many false starts, to work.
To be honest, STP in its earlier iteration was more intuitive to work with and much faster. But this version has several new features I really like, in particular track level equalization (something that's always been a vexing problem for me, that by eyeing the waveform I never quite manage to get right), and many useful refinements. Moreover, to my ear, it sounds slightly better. On balance, it's worth the price of the admission ticket.
It's a good thing, however, that I thought to check not only recording protocols but also the procedures I use on Friday mornings to put together the mix that makes the podcast. Recording doesn't work the same way that it did but it's still fairly straightforward. Putting together a mix, to my dismay, is shockingly different. I would've been stuck for a couple hours Friday morning trying to figure it out, if today I hadn't produced some dry runs to check whether and how it works... And I'm still not entirely sure which changes are "features" and which are bugs... But I'm now 99.9% confident that I won't be caught out Friday at the last minute. On the remote chance something bad does happen I'll post a note on the site but the delay, if any, will be extremely brief.
Posted by George Kenney on September 29, 2009 5:20 PM 
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