Thread: Sound Forge sfk. files

Over the past few weeks i've been ripping load of my House vinyl using Sound Forge - saving them as wavs and then playing around with them and re-saving them as 320's.

Over the weekend i thought i'd have a little mix using some of the tracks, using Tracktor Scratch Pro but encountered a problem. I'd drag a track to the decks and it would be fine but after maybe doing this 2 or 3 times Traktor would freeze. I then tried other folders of tunes that i had and it was fine - only happening with the stuff i'd ripped (wavs or 320's).

Thought it may have been a number of things (problem with the prog, ripping the tunes incorrectly, folder size too big) so i re-installed Traktor and sperated the tunes into smaller chunks. Tried it again this morning and nothing changed.

Then for some reason i decided to delete all the sfk files that SoundForge creates with every new file you create with it - problem solved!! All my rips load fine and no freezing.

So what i was wondering, is what information the sfk file holds and why would it affect something like that? The only thing i know it does is load the file quicker into SoundForge - and if it hasn't got one then SF tell you that the file wasn't created by it.

Not a huge problem anymore (hopefully), but i am curious....

When a sound file is edited using Sound Forge or Sony Vegas, the visual representations of the sound waves are saved as a sfk file. The sfk file does not contain any audio or sound, if you delete them all that will happen is that soundforge will have to rebuild the .sfk taking longer to open the file.

Why it should have any impact on how the associated audio file is read by another program is a mystery as the files are not dependent on the .sfk being present for them to be played. All I can think is that your tracktor library is picking up the .sfks also and trying to play them as audio files, which is just stupid....or perhaps your os is causing a conflict by tying the audio file and the sfk together. using windoze i assume?

^^^^ Yup using Windoze. I figured thats pretty much all they done. Just odd that they seemed to throw Traktor into a paddy. Its not like they were showing up on the tracklist for the folder and i've definitely had sfk's in folders its accessed before without any aggro - maybe it was the amount. Anyhow, matters not - while its all working anyway!!

Cheers Haze

tbh the .sfk files are a tad pointless unless you're dropping track marks over your waveforms as that's where Sound Forge stores the details. thinking on it I wonder if Traktor is somehow confusing the data in the .sfk file for queue points in the audio and that's what's causing the freezes.

anyhoo, unless you're marking up just delete em, not like it takes long to rebuild the gfx should you ever wish to load em back into SF.