Jason:
1) I use Sound Forge 6 for nearly all of my audio restoration work and for creating mixes that require very little sophistication in terms of crossfades and layering. It simply is the best audio editing software available. Sound Forge's only deficiency is in terms of multichannel mixing support, and while the parent company makes a product that does do multichannel (Vegas), the user interface is one I find clumsy and awkward to work with. For any and all multichannel work, I turn to Cool Edit Pro 2.1, by far the best mixing desk software on the market. The nicest feature is that Sound Forge's DirectX audio enhancement plug-ins can be accessed from within Cool Edit Pro, so having to flash back and forth between the two applications is not often necessary. In the case of the IllumiNations Preshow, the entire job was quite easily done in Sound Forge. When you get to something more complex, such as my flow-throughs for WDW's Splash Mountain or World of Motion, the elements were cleaned up and trimmed in Sound Forge and the multichannel remix was done in Cool Edit Pro. Once a final mixdown is produced. the huge resulting WAV is more than likely brought back into Sound Forge for any remaining touchups. Finally, the MP3 is made... up until recently, I was using Radium's hacked version of the Fraunhofer Professional MP3 codec for that, but the recent revisions of LAME (3.9x) have finally surpassed the audio fidelity of Radium to these ears (once the codec has been configured to only use true STEREO mode and not Joint Stereo).
2) The aforementioned Splash Mountain "Soak-Through" is, I think, one of my proudest moments (although there are still parts of it that make me want to go in and re-do the thing)... the "Impressions de France" complete with sound effects and narration is another recent favorite, but that one does need some adjustment. "Spaceship Earth", "Pirates Of The Caribbean (WDW version)", the recreations of the Magic Kingdom Main Entrance BGM, the IllumiNations Preshow, Wonders of Life... all favorites. I'm also fond of my 30-minute Horizons music-only track, but would be much happier if a clean copy of the narration would turn up to help make it complete. We can all dream... and if we can dream it... er, well, you know the rest
3) As to "new and exciting" projects -- I seem to take them up as they land in my lap, which accounts for the scattershot nature of these things... which is to say, it depends on what sort of audio winds up in my hands. There's a 3/4-finished WDW "Space Mountain" project on my hard-drive, but due to a couple of persistently missing elements, I'm not certain when or if it will be completed. I'm certainly always open to suggestions, and considering the volume of material floating around here, many things are possible. My *ultimate* projects are multi-CD walkthroughs of the various WDW parks but, of course, those are on hold until missing pieces come to light. Fortunately, that list of "gimmes" is getting *extremely* short these days. Test CDs of Liberty Square and Adventureland have been done, for instance, and are pretty entertaining -- but you do have to be in for the long haul when listening
Steve