Adobe 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.

by MacNN Staff