Vegas Edit Pro / Sound Forge / Sound Maker Humble Bundle $25

[FlyingPenguin]

This deal expires 12/20/23: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/v ... =bluesnews

Hey, anyone who wants or needs to do video editing, that Vegas Edit is worth the minimum $25 alone. It's 2 versions behind (it's v19, and the latest is v21 which costs $200), but I'm still using a very old v10 from when Sony still owned the software (Magix bought Vegas and Sound Forge from Sony in 2015), and that version does nearly everything I want, but I grabbed this for GPU encoding support (which my old version doesn't have), newer features and codecs. It's a very full featured editor, in the same class as Adobe's video editor.

I just installed Vegas Pro Edit and Sound Forge (not really interested in Music Maker, but I downloaded the installer). Vegas 19 is exactly like my old Vegas 10 (like Adobe, they keep the controls and layout the same from version to version), but with added features, the biggest one for me being GPU encoding support. It used to take forever to render an MP4 in version 10 using CPU alone. It used to take an hour to render a 30 minute MP4 video, now it takes 6 minutes. I haven't used Sound Forge in over a decade (version 5!), but I used to like it way back then, and I will try to use it instead of Audacity now.

It's a lifetime license for all three, but you need to create a Magix user account, just to register the product and activate it. When you first install any of the three major programs, it'll ask you for the serial and whether you already have a Magix account, or want to create one. They will ask you for your date of birth and phone number, but it's not required and I left them blank.

Humble gives you a Magix license number, and a link to a small (6MB) installer downloader, for each program. The downloader then downloads the actual installation files which are half a GB to 1.2 GB each.

FYI: Magix doesn't tell you where they download the installer files, but I figured it out: They're in your documents folder in: C:\Users\{username}\Documents\MAGIX Downloads\Installationsmanager\ (or if, like me, you log into windows as a limited user, and use UAC admin credentials for the install, then they will be in the admin's documents folder). They are not deleted after installation, and it's 3GB of installers total for all three main apps. I moved them all to my server where I keep my installers.

NOTE: Only one of the programs (Sound Forge) tries to install a background app, which is an Update Notifier that will sit in your notifications tray and nag you about updates. During the install process, it will ask you to confirm the install of the Update Notifier (it's a separate installer file from Sound Forge itself), and I just cancelled it and never installed it. Peeps on Magix's forums also say that if you do install it, it can be uninstalled from Window's Add/Remove.

Other than that, there's no subscription service, and while I'm sure Vegas phones home to check for updates (my old version 10 does), nothing was added to my startups.

There are some non-commercial royalty-free music loops as part of the bundle, These are supposed to be used with Music Maker and are normally $4 each, and you need to use your Magix account login to get them from the Magix store. You put them in the cart, then use a coupon code, that Humble gives you, to make it a free purchase, and you get a zip file with your choice of WAV or OGG files.

I haven't dived too deep into the new version of Vegas yet, but it seems to be feature complete as far as I can tell. I just threw a video in there the other night, arranged the desktop the way I like it, turned off the web hub window, which I think is how you access their asset store, and did some quick edits to confirm everything functions the way it does on my old version. Then I did a render. It automatically defaults to rendering on the CPU, but I selected the NVidia GPU option and made it the default, and confirmed that it was actually using my RTX 4070ti for the render by looking at task manager (although the fan noise also confirmed that).

I don't do a lot of editing, but I have a family video project I've been meaning to get back to, and I'll really test it out thoroughly then. The new version did not overwrite my old version, so I'm leaving both in there for now until I'm sure it's all working okay.

I really like Vegas. It works very similar to a commercial MacOS based studio editor I used back in the 90s at a company that does video editing for horse and dog tracks. I wasn't an editor (I did their IT and primarily was their sound engineer) but I had to be familiar with the software to maintain the editor, and they let me use it after hours for personal projects.

Vegas has a very intuitive drag and drop film strip editing system, with a lot of similarities to Adobe Premiere, but not as difficult to use (IMO) as Adobe. Intuitive enough that I can put it aside for a year and then come back to it, and jump right back in without a problem. There's lots of YouTube tutorials out there if you need help with something.

[Losbot]

Hmmmm..................might have to grab that.

[Err]

Thanks FP. What's funny is that the first audio editing software I got was made by Magix. I think I still have the box for it.

[Losbot]

Looking back, I totally forgot to grab this bundle and now I need a decent video editor. UGH