How to “Punch In” With Sound Forge

David H. Lawrence XVII August 16, 2018
8 Comments

Hey, there!

ACX recommends a method, when recording audiobooks with ProTools, called “punch and roll” – when you make a mistake, the software rolls back and lets you pick up with a correction.

(I have a pretty elegant way of using Audacity for producing audiobooks, called the StairStep method, here, if you’re interested. We’ve tested it, and it’s faster, and a better workflow, than punch and roll.)

But now, a smarty pants VO2GoGo fan has a way to do “punch and roll” with Sound Forge.

I got this email the other day from subscriber and fellow SAG-AFTRA member David Stifel:

David,

I see from your amazing website and participation at SAG-AFTRA meetings that promulgation of useful knowledge is something that you like to do.

After enviously eyeing the punch-in capabilities of Pro-Tools and not having the budget or hardware necessary to use that program, I’ve figured out how to simulate the full nine yards of punch-in on Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio 10.0 – put the cursor where you want to start the punch-in, press a key-combination and then the program by itself:

1) Program previews 3 seconds prior to cursor
2) Launch record dialog
3) Start recording at cursor.

It needs autohotkey installed, and I suspect it is a Windows only solution, but if you would care to get the gory details (mainly the autohotkey script) I’m happy to share the info with you. I used to be in software development (for 28 years), and I am very much in favor of NOT using the big bloated overpriced corporate programs (Pro Tools) to do what is really mundane stuff with the bargain priced tools (Audio Studio).

Best to you,

David Stifel
“That Burroughs Guy”
http://www.burroughsguy.com
[email protected]

Well, there you go. If you voice audiobooks, and you use Sony Sound Forge on your Windows machine, drop David a line to get the full skinny on the autohotkey stuff you need to install, and tell him how awesome he is!

Hope this helps.

David

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  2. Darla Middlebrook October 25, 2015

    I use Sound Forge 10 for audio book recording. So very glad that someone has a way to “punch in” with SF10. I’ve been doing something similar by hand. At first, it was time consuming, but I’ve (a) gotten better at it and (b) improved my narrative skills. A better method is, however, appreciated.

    Thanks for the info 🙂

  5. Ian Freeman December 4, 2015

    There’s the Pro version and also the Discount version of Sound Forge. The Pro version is available for both Mac and PC, so this piece is specifically talking about the Discount version, which is not available on Mac, just in case there’s any confusion.

  6. James Tomick August 16, 2018

    I understand that P&R capability is going to be implimented in the next major update to Audacity. From what I unserstand it is being “alpha” tested now. Of course, the other free DAW, OcenAudio, has P&R capability already.

    I’m a REAPER guy. And P&R in REAPER (once you have it set up) is a breeze. The biggest thing to understand in setting it up is that REAPER (like most DAWs) is a multi-track music production DAW. That means it’s default setup is for beats and measures and not time. So the pre-roll asks for the number of “measures” you want to go back before the punch-in. But if you set it up with a 1:1 correlation between measures and time – 1 measure = 1 second – then it’s a piece of cake. REAPER can also be set to record during the pre-roll. So, with it’s non-destructive editing capabiliyty, you have material to play with for fine tuning your edits to make them virtually seamless.