Sound Forge alternatives

David-Rees wrote on 12/18/2025, 4:48 PM

I've been using Sound Forge since 1995 (Sonic Foundry - Sound Forge 3). Its been a fantastic workhorse for editing and managing stereo files (I use Cubase for multi-track as well as various Izotope products). They went through Sony and now Magix. I have a sent a few tech support tickets to Magix, and the last 2 never received any human responses. The last ticket I sent was a month ago and no replies (although I have a ticket number in an automated email response). I decided to google "Does Magix offer good customer support" and can see the answer is overwhelmingly "no". I use the product for client work and often have short deadlines. I've reached the point in my business work that I can't afford to use products that have poor to zero tech support. Can someone please recommend to me what the best alternative is to Sound Forge? It pains me to move on after 30 years, but at this stage in my life I can't hitch myself to a non-responsive horse. Can someone please give me some options for some professional software along the lines of Sound Forge that I might want to consider migrating to?

Comments

SP. wrote on 12/18/2025, 5:21 PM

@David-Rees Magix support was usually good until they were sold to new owners at the beginning of 2025. In summer 2025 they introduced their AI bot customer support and over the last three months they basically stopped answering support tickets. Either they only have one support staff member left who is totally overwhelmed by the amount of tickets or there is no more support staff and only the AI bot. The AI bot might give useful hints for easy questions but it's totally useless if you have account problems or license problems because that needs human intervention.

I recommend to contact the parent company of Magix:

https://www.rmep.com/imprint

https://www.rmep.com/news/rm-equity-partners-acquires-magix-software-gmbh-and-appoints-a-new-management-team-led-by-robert-rutkowski

 

To answer your question regarding alternatives, if you do a lot of scripting, I don't think there are any alternatives. Besides that, there are many similar audio editors. I think Acon Digital Acoustica is an affordable and feature rich toolset. It also has many audio cleaning capabilities.

rraud wrote on 12/19/2025, 10:58 AM

Use an earlier version if possible. I use SFP-15 a lot. SF 16 &17 had display issues using third-party 32 bit VST-2 plugs and the peak playback meters were messed up. The VST issue was 'mostly' resolved with SF-18, but other issues remain. I am also a SF user since v3.

David-Rees wrote on 12/19/2025, 11:30 AM

When I posed my question to ChatGPT, it recommended 1) Steinberg Wavelab Pro, Adobe Audition, and Acon Digital Acoustica Premium .  For client work its important to me that its a robust application that's professional, popular (not going to go away) and well supported. My goal here isn't to bag on Magix, but to learn about the alternatives. Thanks.

rl95 wrote on 12/23/2025, 4:48 AM

I’ve never used a program with an interface as clear and smooth as Sound Forge (same with Vegas), but their frequent VST plugin bugs—essential for audio work—plus High DPI issues (still in 2025!) made me switch reluctantly a long time ago. For editing, I use Acon Acoustica now: it’s lightweight, launches instantly, and very stable with all my plugins. It also has a batch converter and excellent restoration tools (Premium version only). I don’t know about more elaborate macros, as I don’t use them.

I also like the “Project page" for mastering in Studio One. It’s simple, well laid-out, and has good tools for exporting, including DDP. Wavelab is well-regarded among pros, though I haven’t used it myself (if you know Cubase, it should feel familiar). I’ve never been a fan of Adobe’s subscription system, so I can’t really comment on Audition.

Trying the demos—when possible—is really the only way to see which one feels right, but they’re all capable of getting the job done.

MHG-Kreffer wrote on 12/23/2025, 5:28 PM

Have you looked at audacity? It's free and most options are comparable with Sound Forge.

john_barr wrote on 12/24/2025, 5:13 AM

If Magix hadn't abandoned Sound Forge, users wouldn't be looking for other software.

David-Rees wrote on 1/8/2026, 2:28 PM

https://bigfins.com/music/Magix_n.png

Uploads aren't working, so I put the image on one of my servers.

I wasn't aware of this. It helps me understand why Magix does not reply to any tech support requests for the last 6 months.

David-Rees wrote on 1/9/2026, 9:51 AM

Here is a link to the Vegas forum where a Vegas developer discusses how/why Magix dropped all support for Sound Forge, Acid and other products. The forum moderator hid my initial comment and asked me to provide a direct link. Since it is in a thread, you will have to scroll down to comment 5 in this thread: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/where-s-the-vegas-category-sorting-in-the-audio-plugin-manager--149226/ I will also paste what was said below. As a heavy user of Sound Forge since the 90's it depresses me. (from VegasDerek in the Vegas Creative Software Community)

"It is unfortunate Acid, Sound Forge and Vegas broke off into their in development teams. When Magix purchased the product suite, it was stated that they really only wanted Vegas. We asked repeatedly if they had any thoughts of resurrecting the other products (including Movie Studio) and the answer was always no. The only other product they did like was DVD Architect because they had nothing else like it in their product lineup. Sound Forge and Acid and Movie Studio were seen as competition for their existing products.

Well, the time came for us to make the decision about continuing to support SF in the master Vegas code base because we were beginning to make some significant restructuring of the code. Since no new versions of SF were planned, and upper management gave their blessing to us deprecating the application in the code base, we ripped it out of the code.

I kid you not...2 months after we gutted the codebase of Sound Forge and rewrote large amounts of code in preparation for the release of VP 15, management came to us and asked what it would take to do a new release of Sound Forge. We told them it was not possible without dire consequences for the Vegas release. This was true for three main reasons. Number one, engineering resources. At the time we had 5 people working on Vegas. We could not take on another project...we were barely surviving developing Vegas, DVD Architect and Movie Studio. Second, no one on the Vegas engineering team that came over from Sony had any significant experience with SF or audio engineering in general. Finally, if they wanted any of the progress we made restructuring for the SF project, it would had to have been done by scratch again resulting in rewriting a lot of the stuff we had done since the acquisition making it impossible to release Vegas on time.

The company really wanted/needed revenue from SF. Quickly after the acquisition the company became a bit dependent on the bonus revenue. After some time they realized even the old, stale version was still selling well, even with no updates or engineering support.

So, the decision was made to take an old branch of the code base that was about 4 years old, cobble together a small team of engineers who worked on the other Magix audio products and they put together a new version of Sound Forge.

The new version contained none of the infrastructure changes that Vegas contained and it was developed completely independent from the Vegas team, causing the loss of some of that similarity and cross functionality the old product suite had.

The same happened with Acid a few years later...except they had to start from an even older code base.

In the end, it was some poor foresight that resulted in where we are at with these applications now and it is a real shame. If the willingness had been there to develop SF (and a lesser degree, Acid) when Magix had bought the applications, there were more people who could have come over from Sony to work on that code. As I said, Vegas was the main focus of the acquisition. A couple years later, it was really a revenue grab that resulted in the relaunch of the other products."