Sound Forge, Acid, Cool Edit, ARRRGGH!!!

[triple cubic]

Hey, people.

I'm very new to this whole mixing, digital audio thing, and I've been tinkering with Sound Forge XP 5.0, Acid Pro, and Cool Edit. So far, the only thing I've been able to do is mix vocals in Sound Forge with instrumentals.

Can someone please tell me what the differences are between Cool Edit and Acid and which program is superior? I am very lost.

Furthermore, I heard that if you had Acid, you also needed Sound Forge. Why both? Is there something that one program does that the other can't? Please help!

Thanks in advance,

Akwah

 

[tonyA]

Wow, you posted this one in January and here it is, a month later and no one replied to a simple enough problem. Maybe because the answer is so obvious.

Simple put it is just like comparing apples and oranges. They are both fruit, both round, both grow on trees (as opposed to root crops and vines) but a whole different animal (or fruit)

Acid lets you play and combine loops and waves, using tracks. Most powerful feature is that you could match pitch and tempo/beat and even preview them before committing. While you could manipulate your sound waves in Acid, it is limited in that function. That is where Cool Edit and/or Sound Forge come in. Sound Forge XP comes free with any Acid purchase (a good sound wave editor with less features that its more expensive brother.

Sound Forge lets you reverse the sound/play it backwards, add effects (although you could do that in Acid, here it becomes a part of the sound source instead of being added in the effects loop), chop the sound, normalize it, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc (and believe me, quite a few etceteras. Some you could do in Acid. With a couple of back-flips, why not, it is possible, but not so intuitive and easy to do as in Sound Forge while others are simply impossible to do in Acid.

So if Sound Forge is more powerful, why buy Acid? Well because that is all Sound Forge does, while Acid lets you build songs, add tracks, etc, experiment with tunes, beat, etc.

You know, people could write a book about how similar or different they are, but the real answer to your question is, how easy does each one make it for a particular purpose you need it to do.

The real answer wasn't that obvious afterall, was it?