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Edit Review: Apple Soundtrack Pro 2

Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Gary Eskow

Professional tool for audio post engineers.

I remember attending an AES convention held in San Francisco in the mid-1990s where Avid formally announced its purchase of Digidesign, the fledgling company that was producing some startlingly powerful audio products for the Macintosh. The potential advantages for the audio post community were obvious. Over the years, the promise of this merger has been realized, most completely in the advances made in Pro Tools, which has been the de facto standard in audio post for some time. Its price tag, of course, is daunting to some. Final Cut Studio 2 (FCS 2), which includes Soundtrack Pro 2 (SP 2), offers the audio post pro working at all levels of the industry a set of tools that are intelligently designed, easy to use, and capable of helping turn out thoroughly professional projects. (For a review of Final Cut Studio 2, see digitalcontentproducer.com/videoedsys/
revfeat/apple_final_cut.)

I conducted this review on a Mac Pro system provided by Apple that included a 3.0GHz dual-core Intel Xeon processor, a system/application drive, a second storage drive, and a pair of 23in. flatscreen monitors. FCS 2 had been preloaded; my only setup responsibility involved downloading and installing the appropriate drivers for my RME Audio Fireface 800 audio interface card from the distributor's site. After opening up Soundtrack Pro 2for the first time, I navigated over to the recording tab, selected the Fireface 800 as both my input and output device, and established contact. All of the setup procedures are neatly laid out in the PDF manual that ships with the product; it should be pointed out that no hard-copy manual is available.

My space is limited, so I'm going to gloss over the tasks that SP 2 handles similarly to most other applications of its kind. You can, for example, set up the multiple panes that comprise SP 2 to maximize your workflow. This system had two monitors, so I detached the video view, dragged it over to the right monitor, and saved the project. Timelines can be set up to reflect SMPTE locations, bars and beats, or both — you get the idea.

Soundtrack Pro 2 lets you work in two different project categories. A multitrack project is just that: a multitrack recording environment where you can record audio — including automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) — import foley and music clips from the extensive library included with Soundtrack Pro 2, and mix your collected audio in either stereo or surround sound. The implementation of surround sound is excellent.

An audio file project lets you concentrate on a single piece of audio that requires some polishing. You can clean up noise or change its level. It's nice to have this option, but you can easily highlight an individual audio file within a multitrack project and perform all the non-destructive edits you need to make. (Edits are saved with a project, leaving the original audio unblemished.)

Music creation

For starters, I decided to create a music mix made up entirely of audio clips from the library included with Soundtrack Pro 2. I chose a tempo of 116 beats per minute. I auditioned drum loops from the program's browser and selected one. In short order, I added a two-bar electric piano groove, and then a bass guitar pattern — both of which happened to be played in the key of A major. Next came a few percussion loops: shaker and tambourine. After copying each of these loops to create a 16-bar phrase, I set out to mix this masterpiece using the enclosed signal-processing (i.e., DSP) effects.

Before discussing the mix, I need to point out that I experienced some digital distortion at odd times while working with SP 2, including multiple incidents that occurred while I was auditioning loops. SP 2 can incorporate clips recorded at different sample rates — 44.1kHz and 48kHz, most commonly — into a single project, and that capability may have led to some of the confusion that the system experienced. Or SP 2 might not work seamlessly with my RME Audio hardware at this time. Apple tech support had no clearer idea of what might lie at the heart of the problem, which I experienced sporadically. At any rate, reselecting the Fireface 800 as my audio output device and choosing 44.1kHz as my sample rate cleared up the problem every time.

The application does not yet allow you to bring third-party VST or Asio plug-ins into the system (probably for marketing reasons, but it's still a pity), so it's important to examine the quality of SP 2's effects.

Fortunately, the signal processing that ships with with SP 2 is, by and large, very good. Back to my mix, I added a Space Designer reverb to the main output bus — one of three busses that are included. Then I EQ'd the drum loop to boost the kick drum and sculpted out some of the same low-frequency range in the bass track to make room for it. I added a flanger. Finally, I put a delay on the shaker track. Surprisingly, the system crashed on me several times while I worked on a track, including once when I was working on a single file in an audio file project. I also got a “computer dropping audio” error message on several occasions.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.