Soundtrack Pro
is available as both as a standalone product and
as part of the Final
Cut Studio bundle. I am not going to talk much about its integration with
Final Cut Pro (which Apple does quite eloquently at the mothersite) but rather
discuss its benefits as a primary audio editor for the Mac OSX platform and an
external editor for applications like Logic Pro.
Out of the box,
and onto the screen, Soundtrack Pro looks like nothing special. The GUI is
rather plain looking. You see the familiar lanes for audio tracks and
loops, a video track, and typical controls for volume, pan, setting the output,
and record enable, fx, mute and solo. You can customize a single toolbar
that is not dockable or movable. That's it? That was my first thought.
So I launched
the Apple Loops browser and tossed in a bunch of the new Soundtrack Pro Apple
Loops. Not bad. Lots of sound effects for films and some nice
additions to your GarageBand library. Plenty to get started with even if
you don't (for some reason) have GarageBand. The idea here is to get you
into the Jam Packs, which, at a low cost, can give you an immense library of
Apple Loops. There's a really nice automated mixer. The usual
ability to insert real time effects Automatic crossfades. Good stuff
for working fast with audio snips in radio-TV-film production setting and also
good for the home recordists who want to make music without MIDI or software
synths.
Then I
discovered the audio editor opened up in a different tab when you clicked on an
audio region and gave a large view of the waveform against a grid. You can
choose to work destructively or non-destructively with it. You can go to
town with effects, and each time you apply one, an "action" is created in the
list to the left of the screen and the waveform is "animated", that is,
graphically updated. Whoa, thinks Tweak--that is cool. Returning the
waveform back to normal is as simple as deleting the action from the list.
This includes cutting and pasting, fades, crossfades, silencing, amp
adjustments, normalizing, and adding any effect from your computer's audio
units. Once you "flatten" the actions, the changes become permanent. I also liked that I could work on one side of a stereo file and leave the
other side untouched.
If you don't
own a lot of effects you will be pleased with those supplied. I counted
over 50, and most of them look like Logic's effects, same names, yet slightly
modified so they work with a "preview" button. Logic cannot do
non-realtime effects in its audio editor with core audio drivers yet. So
this feature was my first "Hurrah!" In logic, in order to apply an effect
in non-realtime (that is, when the sequencer is not running) to an audio file
you have to bounce. Now, all you have to do is hit the key command to
launch STP from within Logic, edit away, save, and go back to sequencing.
So far, all my attempts have been flawlessly executed.
While
Soundtrack Pro is not a tool for burning CD Masters of your songs, it can be
used to finalize your songs, much like other audio editors. You can do
click and pop removal, noise reduction, apply amp and pan envelopes and you get
many of the dynamic processes you find in Logic--the adaptive limiter, limiter,
compressor, expander, noise gate, Multipressor, as well as the great EQs--the
super cool "match EQ" and linear phase EQ are here among others. In short,
these are the processors you need to bring your songs up to commercial volume
levels. Unfortunately, these processors are not "plugins" per se--they
only show up in STPro and Logic, and not in your non Apple editors like Peak,
Cubase, etc.
While you could
use Soundtrack pro as a stand alone multitrack recorder, its not out to replace
Logic or GarageBand. There is no MIDI editing or the ability to record
MIDI instruments. Its more apt at being Apple's audio Swiss army knife for
all of its applications that can use extensive audio editing.
Of course SoundTrack Pro is designed to
work well with Final Cut Pro as part of Apple's Final Cut Pro Studio bundle.
From FCP you can instantly launch STP when you edit audio. Just make your
tweaks and click save. STP allows you to edit your camera's audio tracks
and add loops and music on additional tracks, making the task of building a
soundtrack intuitive, hence it's name.
