The Sound of Smart Music

By David Em

June 20, 2006

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One thing I learned in film school: If you can afford to pay only one person on your first independent feature, make sure it's the sound engineer. Nothing destroys an audience's suspension of disbelief faster than crummy audio.

Recording the actors live on-set is only the first step of the process. Well-produced films, commercials, corporate productions, and wedding videos also integrate music and sound effects. Traditionally, a music score and quality sound design have been time-consuming and expensive. But the times they are a-changin'.

This week I'll take a look at SmartSound's royalty-free $199 Sonicfire Pro 4 soundtrack creation software and Digital Juice's $599 Juicer 3 collection of sound effects.

A Better Mousetrap

Sonicfire Pro is that rare application that makes it possible for many people to do something that was once prohibitively difficult, expensive, and stressful. Composing a music score usually takes place after a film or video's picture has been locked. There's a certain logic to this. Since the purpose of a film or video score is to reinforce the emotional beats of the film's story and images, it makes sense to compose it at the end of the process.

Unfortunately, this often happens quite literally at the very last minute, with very little time to spare before the show airs. Sonicfire Pro 4 radically compresses the time required to arrange and attach a score to a project.

In broad terms, creating a soundtrack with SonicFire Pro is a two step process. The first step involves selecting music samples from SmartSound's extensive library of recorded music. As the company's name implies, these are not garden variety audio tracks. Each sound clip is made up of several elements that can be seamlessly rearranged to create new variations with different lengths, without affecting the tone or pitch of the original file.

Two sampler music track CDs come with the program. Many more are available for purchase as theme-based CDs (Action, Jazz, Sinister Cinema, Sports, and so on) or downloadable as individual tracks over the internet from SmartSound's site.

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