Soundtrack Pro 2. The original Soundtrack Pro gave video editors some powerful mojo for doing their own audio work, such as easy noise-reduction tools, nondestructive waveform editing, and solid multitrack management. But it didn’t quite offer everything an intermediate and advanced project might need, which is where Soundtrack Pro 2 comes in. It fills those gaps and can put together a sophisticated audio project quickly and capably.

One of the biggest additions in Soundtrack Pro 2 is the new Conform tool, which lets you quickly resync your audio with changes in your video edits. In the past, changing your video edit meant going back to Soundtrack and manually moving each affected sound back into place. The more changes required, the more tedious the process could be. Now, Soundtrack automatically does much of this work itself by comparing your earlier soundtrack with the new video edit and then creating a third project that shows you all of the sound clips that need to be resynced. You can see this all in a color-coded Timeline and quickly accept or reject Soundtrack’s proposed changes with a quick mouse-click. The process isn’t always perfect, but it does solve many sync issues immediately and lets you focus on the trickier cases.

You can also create 5.1 surround-sound mixes. Thanks to a slick visual interface, you can drag a sound’s directional quality around, easily seeing how much of it will play on any particular speaker. It’s very intuitive, but remember that you’ll need a surround-sound controller hooked to your Mac to make this work. When you’re done with your mix, you can also turn it into an old-school stereo mix with a quick menu selection.

Soundtrack is also much better at recording different takes of the same sound and then letting you choose the best version, like when you’re choosing the best Foley sound effect for an actor fumbling with her keys, or the best take of some Automatic Dialog Replacement (ADR) audio (actors record ADR lines in a studio, trying to sync their speech to their on-camera performance). All your recorded versions automatically go into a new MultiTake Editor, where you can quickly solo each take and audition it to your video. A blade tool lets you cut up the takes, and you can quickly combine different segments into a hybrid, slipping the segments in time and applying cross fades to smooth them into a seamless whole.

Soundtrack sports plenty of other refinements too. You can easily lift and stamp (that is, copy and paste) audio properties from one clip to another, automatically matching EQ levels between clips and carrying over other effects. You can clean up sounds in a new spectrum view, which lets you clearly see the frequencies carrying unwanted noise (like a mobile phone over dialogue) and then cut them out. You can import/export OMF and AFF files, giving Soundtrack much better integration with other audio tools. You’ll find more than 1,000 new sound effects (in surround sound) with a focus on environmental and ambient effects. Plus, you can use JKL controls to zip through the Timeline, and a context-sensitive cursor makes it easier to apply quick fades and cross fades.

Soundtrack’s new tools can handle sophisticated projects from start to finish. It won’t replace dedicated multitrack editors for some specialized work, but for many jobs, it’s all you need.

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