Sony do provide a fully featured, time-limited trial period, so you can easily test the performance of SFPM on your particular system prior to making a purchase if you have any concerns on this front.
I did experience the occasional audio glitch when using this feature, but it was intermittent and difficult to reproduce, so I was unable to isolate its exact cause (although my test system does run very smoothly with other audio software I use on a daily basis). The Record pane also includes a Monitor Inputs tick-box to switch on software monitoring if you need it. Instead, you have to export the Regions as individual audio files with the effects applied and then reassemble the songs in another application, such as iTunes, to burn the CD: a solution, but not a very elegant one. What you can't do is then burn the result to an audio CD - and nor is there the capability to export the whole project in something like a Disc Description Protocol (DDP) format that a CD mastering house might use.
With a combination of the Event and Region functions, you can display the timeline in an Audio CD Time format and fully automate parameters for your suite of mastering effects in the Plug-in Chain on a song-by-song basis. Its omission is all the more surprising, as the core elements required to arrange multiple songs along the timeline of a single SFPM project are in place.
The ability to burn a CD from the Sound Forge timeline is something that only came to the Windows version in recent years, but even so, it's now something that PC users take for granted. If you do lots of repetitive editing tasks on multiple files, batch processing is essential, and I imagine that its non-inclusion will be a deal-breaker for some potential users. However, perhaps the two most significant omissions - from my own perspective at least - are the lack of batch processing and audio CD burning features. If you want multiple files open at the same time, tabs appear at the top of the Editor pane, and you can also open a second Editor pane and stack the two panes, either vertically or horizontally. Depending upon where you drag - along a track's edges, in the centre or across tracks - you can select material from just a single track or all tracks again, it's all neat and very intuitive. Within the main display, the mouse can be used to make selections for editing tasks. Using the mouse to change the size or position of the highlighted portion in the overview is very intuitive, making it easy to move the selection or to control the degree of zoom in the main waveform display. Within the waveform overview, the mouse can be used to highlight a portion of the file, which is then shown in more detail in the main waveform area.
The Editor pane dominates, displaying a waveform overview area which shows the full length of the audio file and the main waveform display, where detailed editing is carried out. The upper toolbar strip aside, the main SFPM display is divided into four user-configurable, areas. Once your editing is done, your beautifully crafted audio can then be rendered in a range of audio formats including MP3, WAV and AIF. As well as applying processors individually to a file, or a selection from a file, users can also build plug-in chains and save them as presets, while effect controls can be automated via envelopes. A sensible selection of processing tools is, likewise, available, as is a range of third-party plug-ins from iZotope and Zplane, and any other VST or AU plug-ins on your system are also available within SFPM. All the usual editing tools - trimming, cutting, pasting, adding fades, and so on - are present and correct. You could, therefore, use SFPM to record or edit anything from the simplest mono sample up to a high-fidelity, multi-channel live recording, and presets for recording common surround channel configurations are included. SFPM supports record tasks of up to 32 channels.Hardware permitting, SFPM supports a wide variety of audio formats, and can record up to 32 simultaneous channels at 64-bit/192kHz resolution.