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.
