Opening a File

 

Ctrl+O
Ctrl+F12
Ctrl+Alt+F2

File Menu

Use the Open command to open a media file in a new Sound Forge window. You may quickly reopen one of the previously opened projects by selecting it from the bottom of the File menu.

What do you want to do?

Open a file

  1. From the File menu, choose Open. The Open dialog is displayed.

  1. Choose the folder where the file you want to open is stored:

—or—

  1. Select a file in the browse window or type a name in the File name box. Detailed information about the selected file appears at the bottom of the dialog box.

    If you know that the file format is unsupported, choose Raw File and click the Open button to display the Open raw data file dialog, where you can specify format parameters.

To limit the files displayed in the dialog, choose a file type from the Files of Type drop-down list or enter *. and an extension in the File name box. For example, enter *.wav to display all wave files in the current folder, or enter *guitar*.wav to display all wave files that have the word guitar in the file name.

  1. Click the Open button.

Open a file as read-only

On the Open dialog, select the Open as read-only check box if you want to open a sound file but do not want to alter the data in the file.

This feature is useful if you only need to play the file or copy sections from the file. You can still change the Regions List, Playlist, and Summary information for the file, but these changes must be saved to a new file.

Open a file in Direct mode

You can choose to open uncompressed .aif and .wav files in Direct mode to open a file without creating a temporary file. This speeds the opening process, but doesn’t give you the security of a backup file. In most cases this is not a problem since all changes can be undone (if you have enough disk space). However, if Sound Forge terminates improperly, the file will remain in its edited state.

On the Open dialog, select the Operate directly on the sound file check box to open a file in Direct mode.

Notes:

Preview files

On the Open dialog, select the Auto play check box if you want Sound Forge to automatically begin playback when a file is selected.

When the Auto play check box is not selected, you can click the Play button to audition the selected sound file without opening it in Sound Forge. During playback, the button changes to a Stop button; click again to stop playback.

If playing a file from a slow network or CD-ROM, some skipping might occur.

Merge two mono files into a single stereo file

In the Open dialog, select the Merge L/R to stereo check box and hold the Ctrl button while selecting two mono files in the browse window. The two mono files will be merged to the left and right channels of a new stereo file.

The first file you select will be placed in the left channel, and the second file will be placed in the right channel.

Display more information about the selected file

In the Open dialog, click the More button to display the General tab of the Properties dialog.

Open an AVI file containing multiple streams

If you open an AVI file that contains multiple streams, the Video Stream dialog is displayed after you click the Open button. Use the Video Stream dialog to view information about each stream and to specify which streams you want to open: