Adobe Soundbooth CS4

Like its predecessor, Adobe's audio editing application, Soundbooth CS4, is a compromise. Although it includes more advanced features than the original Soundbooth --multitrack editing, speech transcription, non-destructive editing, automatic volume matching between tracks, and MP3 compression--it's still not willing to take on the role of a full-blown professional audio editor such as BIAS's Peak. Rather, it eschews features commonly found in less-expensive but more comprehensive audio editors for the sake of ease-of-use. Adobe has a clear idea of who its audience is for Soundbooth and that audience is the CS4 user who specializes in film, video, and rich media--someone without a lot of audio experience who needs greater control over sound than Premiere Pro provides, who then might wish to move a project from Premiere, through Soundbooth, and then to Flash, for example. It's set up in such a way that it's easy to remove noise, add music and effects, and adjust volumes between speakers--a solid audio tool for the intended audience. But it's not the best application for music and podcasting projects, as users accustomed to traditional audio editors will likely be frustrated by Soundbooth's limitations and what they might perceive as interface restrictions and quirks, which I'll focus on shortly.

All this and more

I describe the Soundbooth interface in my CS3 review and you can learn the nuts and bolts of many of Soundbooth CS4's new features in my first look at the Soundbooth CS4 beta. In general the design remains the same--a single widow with multiple, dockable panels for editing audio and manipulating effects, markers, scores, and metadata.

Soundbooth's multi-paned interface should feel familiar to CS4 users.

Multitrack editing environment

Multitrack editing is an important and welcome new feature. Assembling a multitrack editing environment is simple enough. As you can when working with movies and digital audio files in a program like Apple's GarageBand, you can drag a movie and audio files directly into Soundbooth's Editor panel to add them to a multitrack project. (You're just as welcome to navigate to your media using commands in the File menu or the Open File and Import File icons in the Files panel.) And, similar to GarageBand, the tracks cascade down the Editor panel. Each track bears the expected Mute, Solo, Volume, and Pan controls to the left side and a representation of the sound wave to the right. A master volume control is found at the top of the tracks.

Standard audio tracks (as opposed to background music Score tracks) include controls on each end for adding a fade in and fade out. And you can perform keyframe volume adjustment by clicking points on a volume timeline within an audio track and then dragging that point up or down to increase or decrease volume respectively over time.

To do much more than add fades, adjust volume, cut and paste entire audio tracks, and reposition tracks in the timeline, you must open the track in a separate edit panel. Once this panel is open you can then add markers and effects to the track, cut and paste portions of an audio track, and ask Soundbooth to transcribe audio to text.

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