The Interface

Basics	Editing	Effects and Tools
The Interface	Common Operations	The Effects Menu
Recording a Sound	Copying Data	The Process Menu
Playing a Sound	Regions	The Tools Menu
Saving a File	Markers	Practice 3
Practice 1	Practice 2
		Resources

What is
Sound Forge?

Sound Forge is an application that will let you capture sounds into your computer and create sound files, which you can then add to your multimedia projects. You can either record from a CD or use a microphone to record your voice or other "live" sounds.

Please take a moment to complete the Sound Forge survey from the link below.

This survey presents a series of questions that will give us an idea of everyone's experience with Sound Forge.

Sound Forge 6.0 Survey

Launching
Sound Forge

To launch Sound Forge, click on the Start menu in the lower left corner of your screen.

Locate Sonic Foundry under Programs in your Start menu and click it to open the Sound Forge Studio 6.0 application. The main interface window of Sound Forge will appear.

The Workspace

Below you can see the Sound Forge interface window, or workspace, where you will do all of your sound creating and editing. The first time you open Sound Forge, the workspace will be empty, just as you see here:

When you open a sound file, the wave pattern will appear in this window.

The Toolbars

At the top of the workspace, you can see two toolbars: one for editing files (the Editing toolbar), and one for controlling sound playback and recording (the Transport toolbar). The graphic below shows you what each button is for:

Notice how the sound controls on the Transport toolbar are very similar to those on a tape recorder.

When you point to each button in Sound Forge with the mouse pointer, a brief description of its function appears. Later on, we'll discuss many of the toolbar functions in detail.

The Menus

The menu bar displays the Sound Forge menus: File, Edit, View, Special, Process, Effects, Tools, Options, Window, and Help. These menus contain various commands or functions for creating and editing sounds.

Opening a File

To create a new sound file, either click the New button on the toolbar, or pull down the File menu and select New:

To open an already existing sound file, either click the Open button on the toolbar, or use the File->Open command.

The Data Window

Each opened sound file has its own data window displaying a sound wave. The data window can be moved, resized, or minimized, just like any other window.

Across the bottom of the data window are some buttons. The zoom buttons (labeled in blue in the graphic below) let you zoom in on the sound wave to see more detail, or zoom out to see more of the wave. The zoom feature in most applications enlarges or shrinks both the height and the width of your view at the same time. However, Sound Forge lets you zoom in and out of the height and width independently:

The Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons change the horizontal scale of the graph; in other words, they stretch or compress the width of the sound wave, while leaving the height the same.
The Level Zoom In and Level Zoom Out buttons change the vertical scale of the graph; in other words, they stretch or compress the height of the sound wave, while leaving the width the same.
The Maximize Width button maximizes the width of the data window so that you can see as much sound wave as possible.

The playbar buttons (labeled in red in the graphic below) let you jump to the beginning or end of the sound, play it, stop it, or loop it so it repeats continuously.

Revised, July 2003