Sonic Desktop SmartSound 2.11 Review

by Andrew Alexander
Published on May 22, 2002 12:00 AM



Often when editing video, one of the last things that gets considered is musical accompaniment. For most of us, adding music to a project is an afterthought; most of the effort goes into shooting and editing good video, and there is not a lot of planning put into what kind of music will be used in post-production. Even if you do have some music available for your project, fitting it together with the video can be bothersome and time-consuming, especially if it is just a bit too long or too short. Fortunately, there are software solutions out there to solve just these problems, and Sonicfire Pro by SmartSound is an excellent example of just such a solution.

The theory behind Sonicfire Pro is an ingenious: you feed it a piece of video, choose a style of music, and it orchestrates a soundtrack complete with a beginning, middle and ending, exactly timed to the length of your video. The program is smart enough to know how to use different “parts” of the music to come up with a soundtrack that is accurate to within one-tenth of a second of the duration of your video track. We’re not talking fades and resampling here; we’re talking re-arrangement of musical elements to come up with a unique, perfectly-timed soundtrack. And if the dozens of supplied musical themes are not suitable for you, you can import your own sounds into Sonicfire and use the same interface to tailor something specific to your liking.

Of course, the software is only as impressive as the music that comes with it, and Sonicfire is no exception here. The standard bundle comes equipped with two CDROMs with about 20 musical themes per CDROM; the pro bundle comes with four CDROMs. All of the music is well composed (to my untrained ear) and the music is all royalty-free, so it’s positioned well for commercial projects. And SmartSound is not sitting on their laurels; with over 30 additional CDROMs containing additional music packages, there is no shortage of musical possibilities.

Since the Sonicfire program is aimed at people with little or no musical background, SmartSound has wisely chosen to keep the interface of the software package as simple as possible, with a quick learning curve, tutorials and lots of help documentation. The program even comes with an excellent Quicktime video giving an overview of the program. Within a couple of minutes, I had composed a soundtrack over some test footage.

Sonicfire is quick to get up and running (I had no problems with installation on a Windows 2000 laptop), but it seems to me that it would take a little while longer to master. The particular nuances of the interface take some time to adjust to, but more importantly, you will definitely need to spend a lot of time sampling the different flavours of music available to you. Thankfully, the folks at SmartSound have definitely put some thought into figuring out how to present the vast amount of music available to you. When accessing the “Maestro” soundtrack editor, you have many different options for selecting the perfect choice of music; by theme, by title, by mood - the musical structures are nicely organized and described, complete with suggestions for what kind of video they might accompany.

Not only does Sonicfire allow you to select a certain style of music, but you can also select from different types of themes within that style. For example, when choosing a Jazz style of music, you can select styles of the same music that are softer or more powerful, faster or slower, etc, all while maintaining the same basic feel of the music. This is exceptionally useful for creating a variety of soundscapes within the same package.

The video element of the program is good, although you are only handling one video clip at any time, so it seems that adding a soundtrack is envisioned as a last or near-last step in the production process (which is just fine, as that’s the way it usually happens). You edit your project together, put together a reference clip (Sonicfire supports any DirectShow compatible video and audio codecs in the video clip) and then compose a soundtrack for it. Sonicfire is not a video editor; it is strictly for creating soundtracks.

Finally, when you are selecting the style and themes of music you want to use, you can preview it all in real-time, and when you have exactly what you want, you can either create a new video file with the new soundtrack, or export just the audio for further integration in your video editor.

As I mentioned, there were some aspects to the interface that I didn’t like, but I’m sure it was nothing I could not work around or get used to. For example, I have a tendency of left-clicking on an audio track to select it, and then right-clicking on the track to select further context options. This has the effect of double-clicking on the track, making it play. I suspect this is perhaps a carry-over of porting the software from the original Macintosh interface to Windows; Mac mice only have one button.

In conclusion, Sonicfire is an excellent program for creating perfectly-timed, unique soundtracks, especially useful if you have little or no experience in music. The folks at Smartsound have poured an awful lot of talent into the Sonicfire program; for very little effort you can get a very slick-sounding soundtrack for your video.