SmartSound Releases Sonicfire Pro 5

Today, SmartSound released Sonicfire Pro 5 – a free upgrade to their already extremely useful music software.

I’ve been using SmartSound products since about 1997 and have always enjoyed the flexibility they gave me in creating interesting and compelling music of any arbitrary length.

However, I fell off the wagon a while back with the release of version 4, with its weirdly named “mood-mapping” feature.  I didn’t understand it and didn’t see a reason to upgrade.

A few months ago, Brian Dickman, SmartSound’s VP of Sales and Marketing, met with me to discuss ways we could work together and I shared with him some of my reservations about the software. (SmartSound’s royalty-free music library has always been excellent, with a wide variety of tunes spanning almost 200 albums – and growing by 3-4 CDs a month.)

Over the months our conversations continued until, about three weeks ago, Brian asked me to record new on-line tutorials for the up-coming release of version 5 of their software. This gave me a great opportunity to play with the software and discover some of its subtler features. Over the last two weeks, I’ve recorded ten different tutorials on the software, which runs the same on both Mac and Windows systems.

My goodness!  If you haven’t looked at SmartSound recently, you need to check out Sonicfire Pro 5. It does some amazing things with music amazingly well. Just as Apple’s Soundtrack Pro broke new ground in allowing us to change the tempo of a loop without changing its pitch, and vice-versa, SmartSound has taken music modification to entirely new heights.

They simplified the initial interface to allow you to create music quickly and easily, without resorting to a timeline. You can create exciting music – with a beginning, middle and an end – at any arbitrary length. You can set keyframes and change instrumentation in the middle of a song. You can have the software automatically determine the best tempo to match your video. And, in a feature that left my jaw on the floor, you can grab a timing keyframe and change the entire structure of the music to match your video by simply dragging a keyframe.

With hundreds of music titles to choose from, software that allows you to modify music in an unlimited number of variations, and an ease of use that makes working with music fun, the latest version of SmartSound Sonicfire Pro 5 is stunning. Best of all, the upgrade is free.