Are there any decent alternatives to Sound forge on the PC for serious audio work? I'm talking about music mastering, post-production, voice over editing, sound design, multiplex audio editing, etc. Basically, a professional tool with a full feature set. I've been using it for about 10 years, although I tried Wavelab for a year back in version 3 when Sound Forge 5/6 sucked really hard. I love the current version of Sound Forge for all of it's tools and features, keyboard short-cutting, deep feature set and overall performance. Also, the ability to quickly work through hundreds of audio files at onces is vital. Basically, it's Photoshop for audio. I'm pretty sure Audition can't say the same, ironically enough. What I don't like about Sound Forge is it's frequent instability under heavy load, tendency to crash (especially when saving files), occasional sketchy performance with some newer CPU/memory intensive plugins like Altiverb, and the Batch Converter's inability to do macros, effect chains with automation, certain processes or marker/region processes. You also can't really cusomize your workspace or toolset like you're usually able to with other kinds of tools (like Maya). Obviously that's sort of apples and oranges, but I wouldn't mind having a little more control over your workspace. Also, the loop editing has gotten kind of gimpy since version 9 came out, so I still use 8 for loop construction. Trying to do any kind of bulk work in a host doesn't make sense for most of the tasks I usually do in Sound forge. I really need a stand-alone editor. Things like Audacity aren't fit for the task and I'm not keen on switching to Mac. It just doesn't seem cost effective and it would likely just limit my workflow in other ways. Even then, I've heard more gripes about Peak than I've ever heard about Sound Forge from others. Other than those, are their any really good professional audio editings tools out there that cost less than a grand?

I thought Pro Tools was the photoshop of audio?

Well like you said there is Wavelab. Have you checked out the latest offerings of that? I know Steinberg is trying to compete with Sound Forge there & i'm sure they have made big updates since version3 .

Ps how clean is your comp? I havn't noticed a tendency to crash personally, but I guess I only use it fairly simply.

Some say Adobe Audition is quite good. Maybe you should give it a try.