Smart Sound’s Sonicfire Pro 4
By: Silkrooster
I purchased Sonicfire a few days ago, I also purchased their Holiday Magic CD, to take care of some holiday videos that desperately needed attention, and received it already. So prompt shipping is a plus. Opening the package I found a DVD case containing 3 DVD’s. One for the program and two sound dvd’s, Core Foundations and Core Sessions. Plus the Holiday Magic came in its own CD case. It did not come with a printed manual, but did come with a brochure style, quick start guide. Installing the program was rather painless, but the registration had failed to finish. Luckily the registration had a skip feature. Registration can also be done seperately via their website. Installing the music library mentioned earlier was as painless, but I found that SmartSound recommends that the CD’s be copied to your hard drive. The two free dvd’s can use up to 3GB of hard drive space, while the Holiday Magic can be 400MB’s and their smaller 22k sound file CD’s can be 200mb’s of drive space.
Sonicfire does come with a help file, but the help file is not organized like a book, each page of the help file is listed alphabetically. So if you know what you are looking for, you will be fine. If you plan on reading from the front to back like a book forget it.
Using Sonicfire
The music library is listed in the Maestro. Clicking on this button will give you a list of all the songs you purchased from Smart Sound, plus those available for purchase via the web. Once you make your selection, you can preview the music, then you can either insert the music directly into the timeline which works great when you already loaded a video, then Sonicfire knows how long of a music clip you need. You are also given the option of opening the music clip, which is listed below the timeline. Where you can then load your video, then use the insert music into timeline button, which it will then set to the correct length. The program does give you options of cutting the music at the current time. Similar to the way a video editing program does by clicking the razor button the music is then split at the current time. The individual music clips can then be resized, moved, or add fade in or fade out on each clip.
