Jimco Software Reviews - Sonicfire Pro (continued)
Choosing Your Music
Sonicfire Pro includes two powerful tools for selecting your music; the Assistant and the Maestro (figure 3). Both of these powerful tools give you the ability to peruse the songs that you own in addition to songs on SmartSound's network. (Naturally an Internet connection is required for the latter.) You can preview a 20-second high-quality snippet of songs that you don't own. In my experience, these snippets downloaded in about 2 seconds making the experience of browsing through them an enjoyable one.
Figure 3 - SmartSound Maestro
If you find one that you want to add to your library, you can purchase the song or the entire CD right from within the Sonicfire Pro application. Individual songs can be downloaded right away while CDs will need to be shipped to you. The Assistant and the Maestro are both impressive tools for selecting music and it's clear that SmartSound has put a lot of work into this area. They've succeeded in creating an interface that makes finding music fast and easy.
Unfortunately, documentation is one area where Sonicfire Pro suffers immensely.
Sonicfire Pro can also import and use audio files from a CD. Because non-SmartSound audio files are not optimized for use in Sonicfire Pro, you cannot work with them in the same way, but you can achieve pretty good results and Sonicfire Pro can rework a song so that it fits well into a block that is shorter than the song. Documentation for using this feature of Sonicfire Pro is limited and what is available is not too helpful.
Unfortunately, documentation is one area where Sonicfire Pro suffers immensely. Help is provided only via a series of long HTML pages. Context-sensitive Help is missing as is a search feature. I found it often difficult to find documentation on specific features. Once I did find documentation, I often found it not particularly helpful and sometimes found it confusing. Fortunately, much of the functionality in Sonicfire Pro is intuitive and doesn't necessarily require documentation. Despite its incredible power, Sonicfire Pro is a surprisingly simple application.
Scoring
Sonicfire Pro offers several features that help you to score your video. To facilitate finding specific locations in a video easily, you can add a marker by pressing Ctrl-K on your keyboard. However, if you want to add a label to the marker (and you always will), it requires you to take the additional step of double-clicking the new marker and editing the label in another dialog. I found this method a bit clumsy and wished for more robust markers such as those found in Sony's Vegas.
If you would like to block off the portions of your video that require scoring and select the music later, you can use placeholders, shown in figure 4 . A placeholder is added to the timeline just like music is. Once the placeholder has been added, you can easily configure music for that placeholder by dragging and dropping music from the Block Window shown in figure 2. While placeholders are a useful feature, it would be nice to have the ability to label them. As it stands, they are labeled <placeholder> which is not too helpful. I can use markers to label the timeline where the placeholder appears, but using a marker means that you have to remove the marker once you've added music to the placeholder.
Figure 4 - A Placeholder