Soundtrack Pro woes

Originally published on Sept 8, 2007

While at the WEVA Expo last month I attended Larry Jordan's excellent Soundtrack Pro seminar. Now for all of you who are wondering what Soundtrack Pro is, it is Apple's audio editor for video. Version 2 was released as part of Final Cut Studio 2.

After getting back from the Expo, I was eager to put into place what I had learned. So last weekend I started refining the audio on my current project. This is a wedding that we did in June. I had promised the bride that she would get her DVDs in early September. Anyway, after a few false starts, I got the workflow down in Soundtrack Pro's multitrack editor. Once I had the sound the way I liked it, I was ready to export the project back into Final Cut Pro (the video editing application). This is where things went wrong.

The export function creates a new audio mixdown file. Unfortunately when I opened the file in Final Cut Pro, the audio levels were all wrong. Some tracks were too loud, some were too soft. I figured that it was my problem, and that I did something wrong. I treaked things some more in Soundtrack Pro and exported again. The audio still wasn't right.

Today, I looked on Apple's Soundtrack Pro forum. It seems like a large number of people have had the same issue. Soundtrack Pro screws up the levels when exporting a file. This is a bug that makes this product unusable for me. Apple never should have released the new version as it is. This is too bad, as Soundtrack Pro is really a nice audio editor. I will wait until they fix the bugs