Adobe Soundbooth CS3

Great Potential, But a Bit Simplified

By Marc Franklin

June 1, 2007    Source: Studio Monthly

With Adobe set to release its new CS3 design package, it seemed logical to take a look at the company’s Soundbooth software, which replaces Audition as the lead audio application. Although still in beta, we went ahead anyway and put Soundbooth through its paces. It was certainly worth the time spent. But I would like to add that while Adobe is aiming Soundbooth at Web and video users who may not need the full features of Audition (which does make some sense), I’m hoping Adobe doesn’t over simplify.

I first started working with Audition when it was included with Premiere Pro. Now that Soundbooth is part of the package, it’ll work in a similar manner as Audition—using the “Dynamic Link” (you click on the clip, right click to open a pop-up menu and then select "Edit in Adobe Audition”). However, there is an option that allows you to still work with Audition if you so choose).

If you’re already familiar with Audition, you’ll notice differences and similarities right away between the two interfaces. With Audition, you must switch between the waveform view to the spectral analysis view. This feature allows you to look at the sound sample and remove or adjust certain problems, using Photoshop-like marquee and healing tools. In Soundbooth, these are all a part of the same screen—waveform on top and analysis on the bottom. And, you can adjust the size of each view according to your immediate need.

Soundbooth allows you to have a video window open as you’re doing your work, while Audition only lets you extract audio as a .wav file for importation. Plus, it has no capability for bringing in an actual video file. Soundbooth offers a navigation window that has a small full view of the audio file you’re working on—and that section is highlighted in the navigation area. This comes in handy when working on long files.

There’s also a new “History” panel that allows you to go back and undo various steps. The History panel can also be saved along with your project file. This is a nice feature that I hope makes it into other Adobe products, such as Audition, which can really use it!

Soundbooth vs. Audition

More Features

There’s a “Tasks” panel where you’ll find all the common tasks you’d want to use Soundbooth for. They are:

1. “Clean up Audio”—Several noise reduction schemes. Some require you to sample the noise you want removed, others” click and pop” removal that works automatically.

2. “Remove a Sound”—a more surgical type of noise reduction. Using the frequency spectrum display you can use a “healing brush” and other Photoshop-type tools for removing specific sounds that can’t be fixed with noise reduction.

3. “Change Pitch and Timing”—for changing the pitch of things.

4. “Create a Loop”—for making musical loops. These let you “paint” different instrumental sounds onto different tracks for a composition.

5. “Create Score with Autoscore”—for non-musicians to score their productions. After playing around with it for a few minutes, I’d place it between SmartSound’s Sonicfire Pro in function, minus the Mood Mapping and Quicktracks in ease of use. With Sonicfire Pro so well established, and Quicktracks for Premiere Pro now offered free, it’ll be interesting to see how Adobe does with the music generation business.

On The Downside

There is something huge that I don’t like—you can’t work on the left and right tracks independently. There’s no way to highlight something on the right track without doing the exact same thing on the left. I’m not sure what Adobe was thinking here. Pretty much every shooter I know has the on-camera mic on one channel and the wireless on the other. If your on-camera mic channel is clean, but you need to do some noise reduction on the wireless channel, you don’t want to do anything to the clean channel. I found myself back in Audition for this reason, and so will everyone else. Sure, there are “work arounds,” but that doesn’t speed up the workflow.

After talking with Adobe product managers at NAB, they said there are no immediate plans to fix this for the initial release. If they do eventually fix it, Soundbooth will pretty much take care of any audio needs a video producer could come up with. Until then, I’ll be using Audition 2.