Sound Forge Audio Studio is a basic audio editor. It is far less expensive than its professional counterpart, Sound Forge Pro. However, Sound Forge Audio Studio still offers a handful of audio restoration tools, including the ability to digitize vinyl recordings straight into the program, as long as you have a vinyl converter turntable available. This audio editing software also provides a handful of effects and effect presets that you can apply to your audio recordings.

Sound Forge Audio Studio comes with 11 DirectX plugins audio effects. The effects found within this audio editor come with a large number of presets. There are 90 audio presets within the allotted effects, which makes it easy for you to find the right sound you are looking for. You can also preview the effects before you apply them to your audio.

One of the nicest things about using Sound Forge is that the entire interface and the toolbars within it are fully customizable. In fact, this is one of the most customizable audio editing programs we reviewed. You can change the arrangement and layout of the audio editing windows. You can also change the toolbars to have exactly the tools that you want. You can essentially create your own audio editing experience within Sound Forge.

Outside of the aesthetics and customizability of this sound editing program, we put its audio restoration tools to the test. Sound Forge Audio Studio does not have the extensive audio restoration plugins that Pro Studio boasts, but its basic audio restoration tools do a fair job at removing unwanted noise from bad audio recordings. Our test audio sample was laced with cracks, hiss and hums over a single voice recording. Using the audio restoration tools found within the audio editor, we were able to remove about 70 percent of the unwanted noise from the audio recording. Afterward, the recording still had some faint pops and cracks in the background, but the quality of the audio was improved.

This audio editor is loaded with a handful of effects and audio editing tools, but it is missing the ability to batch process multiple audio files and the ability to chain multiple plugin effects together. These are features that are found in other audio editors that we reviewed, like Adobe Audition. They are also found in the upgraded version of Sound Forge.

Sound Forge has the ability to extract audio data from a number of different video files. We tested seven different video files, and this audio editor was able to extract the audio data from all but our MPG and M4V video files.

Sound Forge Audio Studio features a fully customizable interface, has multiple effect presets and can extract audio from video files. It is far more affordable that its Pro counterpart and it boasts many features that are useful for a handful of editing jobs.