Sound Forge is a single track audio editor. That means you can't use it very effectively to mix several separate audio recordings. In other words, if you've got a recording of a guitar and base and drums and piano, you can't really mix those sources together well in Sound Forge. We can only work usually with one source at a time. However in Sound Forge, we can combine several separate audio clips into a single audio recording and I'll show you how that's done. I'm going to go over here to the, Office clip here first, which is my dialogue clip.

And just to keep things nice and neat, I'm going to trim off part of it here. Right up to the point where, we can hear dialogue. Okay, so I'm just going to select that area as a loop region and click delete to get rid of it. Its a temporary thing. I'm certainly not going to save over my original file but that's so that we're to the point here where the dialogue starts. >> You know I'm taking a big risk putting you on. >> And now we'll jump to our second clip delayed goodbye, which is a music clip and it sounds like this. Now, I'm going to select a portion of my music clip, maybe about a minute of it.

Just create a loop region, by dragging it across all of my channels and then, I'm going to copy it. And I can do that by going to the edit menu and selecting copy or simply Ctrl+C. We'll go over to the Office 2 clip now and I want to position the playhead where I'd like the paste to begin. So, I've got my playhead right at the beginning of the clip and then, I want to paste into it. But, I don't want to Ctrl+V, I don't want to just paste. If I select Paste, I'm going to overwrite the audio. In other words, I'm going to replace the current audio with new audio.

That's not what I want to do. I want to mix them together. So, if I go into paste special here, I can mix the two sources. Let's click that. And we get the mixer and in the mixer we can preview how the two sources sound together. Now, right now, by default they are both set to 100% and let's hear how they sound mixed together by clicking the preview button. I kind of like one to dominate over the other. And let's see what we have under preset menu and we can say we have things like fast duck and slow duck.

Let's see how fast duck sounds. And when I choose duck here I have the option of controlling the level of the clip that I'm pasting in. You can see that I have two sliders here. One for source. One for destination. The source is where I'm pasting from and the destination is current clip that I'm passing into. And I can raise and lower this audio level. And we'll preview it and see how this sounds. >> MUSIC >> Still like to come down a little more here.

Let's see how this sounds. >> MUSIC >> And we're going to bring the destination up louder. There we go. So, now let's see how this mix goes. >> MUSIC That's pretty nice. I'm a little bit hot here with my dialogue because it's starting to make my meter peak. But I'm going to bring down my source just a little more and my destination right about there. And I'm just going to watch my meters as I listen.

>> That's a good mix. I click OK and now the two sources have become one. >> So, that's the kind of mixing you can do in Sound Forge, but what's the biggest disadvantage here? Well, the biggest disadvantage to this type of mixing is that once we click the OK button, our change is permanently made. It's made to the file itself. We haven't saved it yet, so we haven't overwritten the original file. But, we can't go in there and retweak that mix. We can't change the mix at all. We only have now, one audio source.

We have two channels, but only one audio source from the two combined audio sources. And if we save this file, rather that doing a Save As, well we've lost our original audio file completely. But this is about the only way you can mix more than one audio source in Sound Forge. You can't mix several different tracks of audio the way you can in say an audio mixing program. But you can combine them in this audio editing program into a single source.