Content area
Full Text
3 Sonic Desktop makes fitting audio tracks to video even easier with a new enhancement to its SmartSound line
Over the years I've purchased various royalty-free music libraries for background music in my videos many before the advent of online MP3 preview demos. Some of these were one or two disks, other times a whole set. No matter how much musical material was included, I - and more importantly my clients - almost always found the audio lacking. Frankly, most royalty-free music libraries in an affordable price range sound like someone recorded a garage band.
The other problem with traditional music licenses is that the cuts come only in :15, :30, and :60 versions. It's a rare instance when I have exactly that much video time to fill. And some of these cost upward of a few hundred dollars for a complete library. But as fellow musician Gary Eskow explained in "Scoring with a Computer," (Video Systems, July 2001) there is a better way.
Enter the SmartSound line of products and Sonicfire Pro 2.1 from Sonic Desktop Software of Northridge, Calif. All the music you create with Sonicfire Pro is royalty-free, even for broadcast, so right out of the box it had my attention.
So how does it work? Using a proprietary algorithm, Sonicfire Pro takes pieces of world-class music created by some of the best musicians in Hollywood and divides them into searchable and editable songs and blocks. The Maestro feature is the ultimate in simplicity. First identify how the music is to be used (intro, background, etc.), select the style or mood of music (rock, jazz, etc.), then pick the category of music needed - say, "Narrative" or "Action/ Sports." The program searches the catalog of songs on your hard drive and makes some selections instantly available for listening. You can then dictate the length of the music bed and which variation to audition. Once you've decided which music to use, Maestro creates a soundtrack that matches your desires and hopefully your video, too.
Sonicfire Pro translates sound into a visual medium. While you can't really effectively edit via an audio waveform, the visual data is helpful for determining breaks and general volume highs and lows so that you can match action...