Soundtrack Pro: Professional Sound Design - Apple Pro Training Series
reviewed by Tim Verpoorten
Author: Mary Plummer Peachpit Press Booksite: http://www.peachpit.com/apts.soundtrackpro Released: December 21, 2005. Pages: 528 $45 USD, $63 CND, £31 GBP, 40€ EUR With DVD-ROM with lesson files and media files. ISBN: 0321357574 Requirements: Current version of Sound Track Pro from Apple, Mac G4, or G5 500Mhz, Mac OSX 10.3.9 or later, QT 7.0, 512 megs of ram, Display with AGP or PCI Express graphics card and a display with 1024x768 resolutions or higher and 500 MB of disk space. Strengths: Walking a new user through the program, step by step and giving you a DVD full of sound clips and lessons that can turn you into an Apple Pro Trainer. Weaknesses: Difficult to jump into the book for specific how-to’s. If you’ve been using Soundtrack Pro and want a reference book, this might not be the perfect fit. |
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Soundtrack Pro is part of the Apple Final Cut Studio package. You could also purchase it as a standalone product until the next version due out in March of 2006 when Soundtrack Pro will only be a part of the Studio. Soundtrack Pro was developed to create high quality soundtracks for your music and video productions.
As part of the Apple Pro Training series books, upon completing the course material in this book, you can become a certified Apple Pro by taking the certification exam at an Authorized Training Center near you. (http://www.apple.com/software/pro/training) This Apple-certified book and DVD combo offers a complete, self-paced course in all aspects of Soundtrack Pro.
The book requires a familiarity with Mac OSX, but it assumes you are new to Soundtrack Pro. For new users, the book starts out with basic interface explanation and works into the advanced topics. If you have worked with Soundtrack Pro before, you may want to jump into the lessons a bit further along. I have been using SoundTrack Pro for about 6 months in order to record and edit my podcasts. I found that there were many ideas, options, and procedures that I was missing with my self-taught usage of the software. I felt most comfortable with skimming through the early chapters and then paying close attention to everything from lesson five and beyond.
The chapter, or lessons as they were called moved along quickly and were laid out as follows: Lessons 1 and 2 described the interface and explained how to find and use your files and arrange them in a timeline. These are basic techniques that you will use through the whole book. Lessons 3 and 4 had you building a soundtrack from scratch. You will choose sound effects, and begin using some of the basic editing functions on the tracks in your production. Lessons 5 and 6 were the starting points for my studies. They focused on using the powerful waveform editor in Soundtrack Pro. You learn how to amplify, stretch, edit and customize the sound. Then the podcasting features made their appearance with learning to work on voiceovers. The book explains the ideas of normalizing, amplifying, noise reduction, compression and how to fix problems like clicks and pops and hisses.
In lessons 7-9 you learn how to record, mix and add effects to your sound file. Than after you do all those to your file, you’ll learn how to modify the output levels to prevent clipping. Again, this set of lessons was very useful for anyone that wanted to use Soundtrack Pro to do their podcasting work. You finish up the lessons with the final three lessons on exporting and managing you files, then learning some advanced Soundtrack techniques and finally how to use Soundtrack pro with the other Apple Pro programs in the Final Cut Studio package.
As I look back over the lessons, there were times that they really got in the way of a fast, easy method of help. Lessons with example files can give you the experience you need to take full advantage of Soundtrack Pro, but for a fast reference item, this book was overkill. For anyone that purchased Soundtrack Pro and wanted to learn the program inside and out, this book is perfect for you. If you are only using a small portion of the program for either recording or mixing or editing, then the manual that came with Soundtrack Pro will suit your needs.
