10/26/2006, 9:15am, EDT
Thursday, October 26th
Adobe releases Soundbooth beta
Adobe has posted a beta of Soundbooth, a new sound editing application with visual tools for creating and editing audio and fixing common audio flaws using visually-oriented tools. The application, built in the "spirit of Sound Edit 16 and Cool Edit," provides the tools video editors, designers, and others who do not specialize in audio need to accomplish their everyday. Users can clean up noisy audio, edit audio files/tracks, visually identifying and removing unwanted sounds, record and polish voiceovers, add effects/filters, and easily create customized music without much musical expertise. The company is offering the solution for Intel-based Macs only, saying that "Apple is quickly moving its focus towards Intel Macs, and no longer sells Power PC systems in many places. By focusing on Apple's future, we have been able to bring this powerful application to the Mac platform much more rapidly, and with a stronger feature set."
"Adobe Soundbooth is a completely new, highly intuitive audio creation and editing toolset designed to accelerate the integration of sound into video and Flash workflows," said Jim Guerard, vice president and general manager, Dynamic Media at Adobe. "Our customers asked us to make Soundbooth cross-platform because so many creative shops rely on both Macs and Windows based PCs. We look forward to the feedback from the creative community as we refine the product over the coming months."
The preview build, which expires on February 28, offers a preview look at the application. Adobe says neither the quality or feature set is final, noting that due to licensing restrictions the beta does not support all of the formats that the final release will support, including MP3, MPEG-2, H.264, and FLV. It requires Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or later. The final version is expected to be released in the middle of 2007 (pricing not determined).
Soundbooth includes tools for customary audio production, allowing users to record new dialog tracks, sound effects or other audio assets or transform existing audio files with sample-accurate tools that cut, copy, paste, fade, stretch, and add effects. Soundbooth also provides tools that fix common flaws in audio recordings and streamlined mastering tools to clarify vocals and polish files after editing. Users can also speed the process of creating customized music to accompany their projects with the AutoComposer feature.
Soundbooth complements Audition
The company said it will continue to offer Adobe Audition, its professional sound editing package, as a standalone product for audio professionals working in markets such as broadcast radio. The company plans to offer Soundbooth in place of Adobe Audition as the audio component in its integrated video solution, Adobe Production Studio.
"While Adobe Audition is designed to give audio professionals in music, film, video, and radio a flexible audio production toolkit that can handle a broad range of audio engineering tasks, Adobe Soundbooth is focused on creative professionals without audio expertise, or those who prefer an application focused on making short work of the most common tasks they handle every day," the company wrote in its FAQ. "The tools in Soundbooth remove the mystery from editing while preserving superb sound quality."
Separately, Adobe earlier this week released a beta of Flexbuilder 2, its integrated development environment for rich interactive applications.
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Should'nt Apple make Rosetta go the 'other way'?
Apple makes these transitions to new hardware fairly seemless, but make the old hardware second class fairly quick.
We just bought 12 last-gen G5s to avoid having to purchase new hardware *and* new software at the same time when Adobe finally get round to updating their apps...
The release of (a Beta version of) this Soundbooth for Intel only is at this point an aberration. I would like anyone to tell me of other application that is Intel only and not UB. I don't think there is one. I would not be to worried that this would become a trend. Even Adobe's offical FAQ document about transition to UB specifically mentions XCode and UB apps.
PowerPC (G4 and G5) people, don't be too concerned. You'll be fine for years. As for this little app, there are plenty of other alternatives anyway; you probably won't miss anything important anyway.
The Intel-only thing is weird though. Certainly most Mac-based video editors are still running Power Mac G5s considering the short time the Mac Pro has been out. It seems silly to only support Intel so soon. Maybe they're using assembly code or something that isn't a problem for the cross-platform application as long as they only support x86.
vasic, There most definitely is a way to compile Intel-only applications in XCode. It's as simple as compiling for PowerPC only, just uncheck the PowerPC checkbox. Additionally, the default configuration for a debug build on an Intel machine is to build Intel only (presumably to speed compile times). I have specifically built my applications as Intel-only with no problem. (My apps are Universal, I was just trying the option out.)
There's an FAQ on Adobe's web site - on the CS2 web page
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/
Nothing like spreading FUD.
So the issue here is that there's a LOT more going on... the question is will the Mac "press" act like real journalists and dig up the real story, or simply be a part of Cupertino's marketing department?