[Dan Benkman]

I’m happy to say that the procedure described above to make LoudMax work with Sound Forge also works for Vegas 13. Just follow the procedure for adding it to sound Forge using the corresponding Vegas menus.

No more beeps! No more useless emails to Magix! No more combing forums looking for solutions! No more deleting and reinstalling your AV software, only to have to do it again and again and again!

[Dan Benkman]

The LoudMax plugin works very nicely.

My original Wave Hammer ‘beep’ problem with Windows 10 was from attempting to install Vegas 14 from Magix. It would never install, and going back and forth with Magix resulted in zero help, until I finally gave up in frustration. They are an incompetent company However, it made my Vegas 13’s Wave Hammer beep.

I do lots of audio work, and have 2 versions of sound Forge, 9 and 11. First version 9’s Wave Hammer started beeping, and then several weeks later version 11’s Wave Hammer Started beeping. I think Windows 10 updates probably eventually causes the Wave Hammer plugin to go to demo mode regardless of the version.

It is utterly absurd for the software owner, Magix, to have no solution for this other to delete and reinstall your audio and video software — only to have the beeps return after another automatic Windows update. All that really means is that Magix has absolutely no idea how to fix the problem, and quite likely never will.

I tried a couple of audio files with both Wave Hammer (ignoring the beeps) and LoudMax using Sound Forge. For good musical quality Wave Hammer’s ‘Smooth Compression’ setting gives pretty good compression without audio artifacts. Deeper compression can cause audible compression if you are concerned with something like classical music.

I found that a setting of about -5.5 on LoudMax approximates the compression you get with Wave Hammer’s ‘Smooth Compression’ setting. But you can compress even more with LoudMax without hearing obvious artifacts.

I tried a sound file of live symphonic music that has a very soft section followed by a loud section. To my ears, LoudMax did at least as good a job as Wave Hammer.

To install LoudMax in Sound Forge, copy the DLL to where the other 64 bit DLLs are, probably in C:\Program Files (x86)\Sony\Shared Plug-Ins\Audio_x64. Then go to Sound Forge/Options/Preferences/VST Effects. Make sure that this path is included. If it is not, add it to ‘Alternate VST search folder’ 1 or 2.

You may then have to go to’ Fx Favorites/Recreate by Plug-in Name…’ or just exit and restart Sound Forge.

Then when you go to Fx Favorites, you should see LoudMax… in the first pulldown menu.

Just imagine being free of Wave Hammer beeps forever!

[Dan Benkman]

After all the hassles I mentioned, I did get Vegas 14 to install on my desktop. But I was never able to get the extras (image stabilizer and titler) to run, thanks to the utter incompetence of Magix.

But I could never get 14 to install on my laptop, even though I could uninstall and reinstall 13 on it without problems. And of course Magix offered no solution to this problem either.

As far as Vegas 14 vs 13 goes, having tried both on my desktop it looks to me like the same blowups that can happen with 13 also happen with 14. My guess is that they did little to fix 13’s bugs, and instead just added the new titler and image stabilizer (proDAD) — which at any rate at least for me cannot be enabled, and are thus totally useless.

So if 13 blows up too much for your application and computer, I suspect that 14 won’t work any better. But it may be worth a try if you already paid for it. It is possible to have both 13 and 14 installed on the same computer, so you can probably install 14 without removing 12.

I understand about being used to Vegas, but I have my doubts that Magix will be able to keep Vegas usable and up to date, and at any rate they can’t support it. So inevitably people who want the latest features will have to abandon the Vegas platform and learn a new one.

But for now I just live with 13 and tolerate it’s occasional (for me) blowups.

[Dan Benkman]

If you like Vegas, drive Magix out of business so that a real company can take Vegas over and make it a viable product again.

[Dan Benkman]

Magix’s latest response is to ask, once again, for the order number that they never sent because they could not send anything to my original email address but their ads because of their screwed up server, or whatever.

So I simply copied and pasted my response from a week ago when they asked the very same question, once again explaining that I never received the order number — which of course any competent company could look up anyway.

This is the very essence of incompetence. They keep asking for the order number that they never sent, and I have to keep explaining that I don’t have it and why.

I have requested that they cancel the ticket, keep my money, and leave me alone. They are simply an irritation.

Magix is definitely not a viable company with a viable product. Don’t let their advertising fool you into taking a chance on buying any of their products. Don’t give them a single penny for any of their products.

[Dan Benkman]

Going in circles with Magix continues.

They DID fix my original email problem — the one where I never got their email that gave me the serial numbers to enable the Vegas Suite software to run.

So I got the serial numbers from the Magix site (NOT the email, which never came), now that I could log in with my old email. However, the site only lists the serial numbers for the Sony/Magix software, NOT proDAD or the Titler.

When you purchase and download the Vegas Suite from Magix, you get an exe file that downloads and installs all the software you purchased. That included proDAD and the Titler in my case. However, I cannot run them, and have been going in circles about this with Magix. By full circle, now they are now telling me to REFER BACK TO THE EMAIL I NEVER GOT, as if all these months of emails about the problem had never happened.

A couple of other things happened along the way. I DID get Vegas 14 to run on my desktop when they fixed my old email. But WITHOUT proDAD and WITHOUT the Titler, I found that 14 has essentially the same bugs and same blowups that Vegas 13 has, especially when mixing multi-track audio with HD video, so the net gain for my money and all the exasperation dealing with Magix has been ZERO.

But it’s worse than that. Vegas 14 will not run on my laptop. When I try to run it, it comes up with this error:
LoadLibrary failed with this error 1114: A dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed.

Rebooting, reinstalling 14, deleting Vegas 13, all have no effect. Reinstalling 13 works, 14 simply won’t run no matter what. Their suggestion to install various Visual Studio Redistributables had no effect. They were all up to date anyway, and at any rate should be handled by their installation software.

And now, Wave Hammer in 13 beeps on my laptop because it has decided to become unregistered. Apparently there is no simple fix to this result from trying to install 14.

The bigger picture is this: Magix is incompetent. They can’t connect the dots between one email and the previous one, so they simply cannot solve these problems. It is beyond their capacity to deliver to the customer what they purchased.

If everything installed and ran when you bought it, consider yourself lucky. But if things didn’t work, realize that even after spending hours interacting by email with their customer service that you may NEVER get what you paid for to work, EVER.

At some point, you’d expect that they’d simply refund your money, but they are probably not set up to do that.

I purchased the Vegas 14 suite last November. It is now March, and it still won’t work as advertised. I asked them a question they won’t answer:

How can they expect me to purchase any new software from them, ever?

It looks like Magix has a competing video editor of their own that they wrote, and they may be simply trying to kill off the Vegas line. Either that, or they just don’t apply enough resources to fix their problems with inadequate customer support. They clearly don’t mind having a bunch of angry and frustrated customers, at least not enough to fix it.

So I ask the question here: Does it make sense to ever purchase another product from Magix? As far as I’m concerned, the answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT!

As it stands, now, I’m giving up. My time would be better spent researching and learning a whole new video/audio editing suite from another company than trying to get what I purchased from Magix to work. The money I spent on it is officially wasted.

Are there any suggestions for a not too expensive alternative to Vegas that includes decent multi track audio editing and mixing tools? The main problem with finding a good alternative is simply taking the time to learn enough to see if it will do what I’d want, so any suggestions for a competing product would be appreciated.

Magix is killing themselves by their own incompetence. My personal recommendation is to help them fail by never buying any of their products.

[Dan Benkman]

Eric,

The original ticket number is Ticket#2017010517008464, but they closed it without fixing the problem.

I opened a second ticket after that one was closed. That is number is Ticket#2017020517000344. They never responded to it after their automated reply.

Thanks for any help you can give, but I’ve pretty much given up. How can I trust them enough at this point to ever buy anything else from them ever again? They are killing their business with incompetent customer support.

Thanks,
Dan