The remaining new additions to SFPM3 are less attention-grabbing but worth mentioning. It’s a fairly simple system, but for basic fixes, it gets the job done. The controls in the Repair tab then handle selected glitches and overs in one of three ways: ‘Interpolate’ joins the ends of the wave on either side of the selection with a straight line ‘Replace’ overwrites the selection with the material immediately preceding it and crossfades the edges and ‘Copy other channel’ replaces the material one stereo channel with that of the other. In the Find tab, you tell the engine what to look for in the selected audio file: ‘Glitch’ (clicks and pops), ‘Level above’ (the next point at which the level exceeds a specified threshold), ‘End of silent region’, ‘Largest peak’ and ‘Clip’ (places markers at all points in the waveform where the signal exceeds a specified clip level). The Find/Repair tool is a two-tabbed panel. Loudness Levelling is a new entry in the Tools menu that, when activated, automatically adjusts the loudness of the selected audio file to make it compliant with the EBU R128 or ATSC A85 broadcast standards, as selected in the Loudness Meters’ Mode menu. As excellent as RX and Ozone Elements are, they’re separate ‘things’, rather than being part of the core of Sound Forge Pro Mac 3 Mac itself, and since not everyone’s going to want either/both - and indeed, some might own one or both of them already - we think there should be an option to bring the price down by foregoing them.

Over 70 presets are onboard, each of which has its own underlying effects chain and is tweakable via EQ Amount and Dynamics Amount macros, and the Maximizer Threshold slider. Ozone 7 Elements is a preset-driven mastering plugin, powered by the algorithms of iZotope’s legendary Ozone 7. The main editor is standalone, so you have to export/import between it and Sound Forge to use them together, but the four modules also install as individual plugins. RX 6 Elements comprises the main spectral editing interface of RX 6 and four of its audio repair modules: Voice De-noise, De-clip, De-click and De-hum - the essentials of music restoration.

Magix is making a lot of noise about the bundling of RX 6 Elements and Ozone 7 Elements with Sound Forge Pro Mac 3, and understandably so, as these cut-downs of iZotope’s superlative spectral audio editing/ restoration and mastering suites sell on their own for £99 apiece.

Sony sound forge free for mac