Sound Forge Auto Region

In this tutorial I will talk you through 'Auto regioning a whole sample CD', this is something I have had to do many times especially when converting a CD using an extractor like Audiograbber. Its useful as hell to be able to cut all the individual components up into slices that are almost exactly edited. A small note here about the end points, you should try when editing to give the release time a bit of slack especially when the sounds you are editing have long trailing decays. Just experiment and dont chop off the ends of your reverbs.

OK, so start up SoundForge and load in one of the tracks in .Wav format of course after they have been extracted from CD, go to the process menu and select Auto trim/crop under function select 'remove silence between phrases [creates regions]'. Now in this setting it will show the fade in and out times both to be 20ms, personally I find this a bit long especially if the CD has lots of drum sounds with fast attacks, change the fade in time to something like 5ms and lower the Attack threshold to something more realistic like -55.0db.

By using these settings you aim to keep the start points tight but not too close so that you dont lose the air on the front of the samples etc. Now press OK to auto region and wallah its done! all nicely cut into regions that are ready to be extracted into individual files.

Also its worth experimenting here as some long pad sounds will need lower threshold settings etc.

Another important factor especially when editing percussion loops is setting the 'Minimum Inter-phrase Silence' this is the minimum amount of silence which must exist between phrases before a new region is created. It can be adjusted to suit your needs and is very useful with percussion loops that contain small sounds, the auto trim will quite often think that the space contained in a loop is actually the end of and beginning of a new sample, so to counter this adjust the 'Minimum Inter-phrase Silence' value to something like 0.3 seconds.

Extracting the regions
Once you have created the regions they need to be extracted to individual .Wav files, to do this go to the Tools menu and select Extract regions. Uncheck the check box 'Use long file names for destination filenames' and type in a prefix that is useful to you i.e. trk2- for track2, you can then automatically number the files as they are extracted by using the start file index counter, I usually start mine from 1 but you can use any system here you like. If you use Trk2- and start at 1 the files will look like this
Trk2-01.wav
Trk2-02.wav
Trk2-03.wav
Trk2-04.wav

Personally I find this really useful. The next thing to do is set the output folder and then the OK button. All the regions will be cut up and saved to individual .Wav files

Batch converting auto region
Now if you saved your settings as a preset in auto region you can batch "auto region" every track from the CD. simply go to the Tools menu and select batch converter, go to the file menu add all the tracks from the CD and then go to settings. See previous batch converter tutorial for detailed explanation, under class select process and in function select auto trim/crop. Then under preset select the preset you saved earlier. Now run the script outputting the files to the same directory they are stored in and they will be auto trimmed and regioned ready for extracting.
Unfortunately its not possible 'as far as I know to batch convert the extraction process but doing the previous will still save you half the time.'