Adobe Soundbooth Passes Audition

Adobe will replace its Audition sound-editing application in the next version of its Production Studio suite in favor of a new application called Soundbooth. The new application designed for people who aren't in a band, aren't with the band, and frankly would prefer that the band keep it down so they can get some work done.

In other words, it's for people who don't have backgrounds in audio editing, but who use other applications in Adobe's suite--Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Encore DVD--and occasionally need more sophisticated audio tools than those applications provide. Most of the elements you'd work on in Soundbooth would start out in one of those applications--say, an audio track from video you're working on in Premiere Pro. Audition, in contrast, was designed for audio professionals.

Soundbooth looks like Audition in some ways; for example, it has very similar waveform and spectral windows (click the images above and on the right for larger views). But Adobe says it tried to make the interface accessible to people who use other Adobe applications. It uses more standard Adobe terminology, and the application is more task-based, rather than tools-based, as Audition is. The Adobe rep I spoke to emphasized Soundbooth's "discoverable functionality," and from what little I saw of it, it does seem easier to grasp than Audition is. The rep was quick to say that it's not Audition Elements, though.

Some neat things I saw: on-clip editing, meaning you can, for example, select a piece of audio, then drag up and down to match the rest of the clip's volume. To input a fade, you click and drag a little button on the clip; dragging up and down adjusts the intensity of the fade. I also liked the task-based panels for things like noise removal (as opposed to the ragged list of tasks in Audition) and the new AutoComposer, which helps you create customized music tracks from the looping audio samples that come with the application. It uses the same Adobe Media Encoder engine that Premiere Pro uses, so if you've figured out how that works, you'll be comfortable using it in Soundbooth.

You can use automatic or manual noise reduction; a small dialog box lets you adjust two sliders--I think that's still the "automatic" reduction, because Audition has an incredible number of noise-reduction settings, and I can't see Adobe eliminating all of them and keeping its suite customers happy. The Adobe rep says the dialog box will pre-select appropriate settings for noise reduction, so most people will be able to just say "'OK."

I think that's a strength of many (but certainly not all) Adobe applications--they recognize that sometimes you just want to hit "OK," and sometimes you really want to get in there and tweak. Many applications either rely too heavily on rigid wizards or they throw way too many tools at you with no help using them. The trick is giving you all the power you need and still making the application easy to use--no mean feat.

The beta should be available for public preview today; the final version should be released sometime next year. Audition will still be available and updated for those who want it, but it'll have to go it alone from here on out.

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