By Staff, December 16, 2008
December 9, 2008 - I first used SmartSound music in 2003 in the consumer editor Pinnacle Studio 8. 1 immediately fell in love with the vast selection of professionally scored tunes, the ability to drag and drop them to a customizable length, and the fact that I could use them royalty-free.
Since I'm not a musician or even a musical wannabe, I also appreciated the ease of use: specifically, the fact that you could choose songs without having to build them out of loops. After you made your choice, Sonicfire Pro did the rest, fashioning a complete piece of music with a beginning, middle, and end to fit the duration of the associated video clip- something you have to do manually with loops. Loop-based music definitely has its place but not on my hard drive. Later, when I started editing with professional tools, I progressed to Sonicfire Pro 3, which was, at that time, the most current version of SmartSound's stand-alone application. The ability to sample and select music was great, even though true audio editing or music-customizing tools were modest, probably because SmartSound correctly assumed that most users would prefer to perform the final mix in their video or audio editor. So you could adjust duration and volume in Sonicfire Pro, but you could do little else.
Then, in Sonicfire Pro version 4, SmartSound added a feature called "Mood Mapping," which let you change the instruments used at various segments of the mix
. In the introductory section of a tutorial or an interview, for example, you could have five or six instruments playing and then cut down to one or two instruments when the dialogue started. This feature required a new type of music called multilayer music (MLM). In the beginning, there were only 10 libraries of MLM. But as of September 2008, this number had grown to 79. It should hit triple digits sometime in mid-2009.
With Sonicfire Pro 5, SmartSound has enhanced your ability to find different songs, but more importantly, it has dramatically improved your ability to customize songs to fit your video content. Specifically, the new Timing feature lets you choose a generic song from SmartSound's library - any song, not just MLMand make it sound like it was custom-written for your commercial, tutorial, or other video project.
I'll describe the new features in detail. Let's start by identifying the product configurations offered by SmartSound.
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