Sound Forge is a dependable workhorse for music and video producers, handling destructive audio-editing tasks in a straightforward manner. It specialises in preparing files for use in other programs, editing and saving them directly rather than layering and exporting as multitrack software does.

Typical uses include creating samples for use as MIDI instruments, designing sound effects for videos and mastering finished mixes.

The high upgrade price from Sound Forge 9 led us to expect some significant new features. Top billing goes to event-based editing. When activated, an audio file ceases to be manipulated as a continuous stream, but instead is presented as blocks of audio. Initially, a file comprises a single block, but cutting and pasting adds more, and blocks can be split in two with a key command.

Events behave in a similar way to audio objects in the Sony Vegas family of video editors. Here, it turns Sound Forge into an odd hybrid of destructive and non-destructive editor: events can be trimmed and faded non-destructively, but applying effects and other processes is destructive. You can switch in and out of event-based editing, but saving in WAV format discards event boundaries.

Event-based editing has numerous practical benefits. Sound design often involves manipulating discrete sections of audio, so the ability to switch in and out of event-based editing and perform non-destructive fades proves to be a valuable time-saver. It also paves the way for two other new features.

One is support for various software sampler files. These typically comprise individual samples, laid out across a MIDI keyboard and performed as a musical instrument. Some samplers include their own destructive editing tools, but Sound Forge's are invariably superior. The list of supported formats is, however, disappointing.

There's no support for Native Instruments Kontakt, Steinberg HALion or Emulator X libraries.

Event-based editing is also crucial to the new disc-at-once CD authoring facilities. Sound Forge incorporates most of Sony CD Architect's features, creating Red Book-compliant audio CDs for professional replication. CD Architect is still bundled with Sound Forge, but keeping everything under one roof is a little neater.

However, the audio plugin chainer, which is used to process tracks for mastering, must be applied to the entire file. An option to apply a chain of plugins to an individual track would make mastering easier. CD Architect can do this, but its lack of VST plugin support cancels out its advantage.

Our favourite new feature is Èlastique Pro, a time-stretch and pitch-shift plugin. Annoyingly, though, there's still no intelligent pitch-shift processing to bring monophonic recordings such as a vocal in tune with a given key.

These so-called Autotune effects may be more at home in multitrack software, but something akin to Cubase's VariAudio would be a big asset in Sound Forge's toolkit.

Other new processes include better sample-rate and bit-depth conversion. It's hard to become excited about these utilitarian functions, but our tests confirmed that they produced noticeably less noise and fewer aliasing artefacts than their predecessors.

It's frustrating, then, that the improved sample-rate conversion is available only for converting files, and not for adjusting the playback speed of a sound.

The Mastering Effects Bundle, developed by iZotope, has grown from four plugins to six, adding a multiband harmonic exciter and stereo imager. This is one of Sound Forge's key attractions. A resonant filter completes the new audio processes. Sound quality is poor, though, and its controls are unhelpful.

There's also a clutch of interface tweaks, including better access to metadata, tabs for switching between open files, and the ability to save and recall screen layouts.

However, there's still no spectrum-based audio editing for surgical edits of specific frequencies, a feature that Steinberg's WaveLab introduced back in 2006. Even so, we still prefer Sound Forge to WaveLab because its streamlined interface is significantly quicker to use, and it also has a superior Mastering Effects Bundle.

Despite all the tweaks, there isn't enough here to justify the high upgrade price. Registered users should receive an email inviting them to upgrade, but for new users, $462 is steep for what is ultimately a simple application.