This is the only brand new (version 1.0) application in the suite. It is also the only audio specific application and It replaces Adobe Audition in the suite, which is now available as a separate item. Adobe says Soundbooth (SB) is designed for video and Flash developers who need audio, and that Audition is designed for the audio professional. Being video and Flash professionals ourselves, we are not overly familiar with Audition, but we know other audio tools and use them as our guide here.

SB is designed to be “task based” in Adobe’s words. By which they mean they have broken down the primary tasks that visual artists tend to need from audio tools, and made them simpler. In theory this is good, but how well is it carried out?

Adobe has been big on showing off SB’s ability to “visually Photoshop out background noise“, an impressive demo you are sure to have seen by now (www.adobe.com/go/vid0245). But what about its recording abilities, and its audio sweetening tools? We found the arrangement for both of these tool sets less than ideal, but nothing we couldn’t warm up to in a day of work.

The EFFECTS menu lists most of the usual controls but also an extra “Advanced” sub-menu containing advanced versions of the same effects. What this means of course is that the more advanced your work is, the more likely you will need to travel further to get what you need. It would have been nice if instead of the wasteful duplication, Adobe had simply offered some preference setting or an “Advanced” button within the dialogs.

We looked for some basic tools we use all the time like a “normalize” function. We could not find it under Effects but instead found it at the bottom row of tools oddly named the “Louder” tool. The online help informed us that clicking this once would normalize and clicking it multiple times would perform a hard clip. There were no customizable settings available. This is needlessly confusing, and less than helpful functionality.

We began to learn that this was the type of simplification Adobe was talking about. We were not thrilled by it, and hoped this is simply a version 1.0 issue rather than a philosophy at work. Tools can be easy to use and still have additional functionality tucked away somewhere.

Another problem we encountered was an inability to create new project files. We could open an existing sound file or we could record a new one, but we could not simply start a new blank one. (Yes, we looked for FILE > New…). And while you can have multiple files open at once, we were unable to view more than one at a time using the “project window” pop-up menu interface.

We also looked at the “Autocompose Score” tools which let even a newbie produce license free music for their projects. Unlike more sophisticated programs, SB’s implementation is rather simplistic which in turn will limit its use. We are not sure if the small number of compositional controls were a limitation of the software or the particular score tracks we loaded. We only saw 3 controls max in any autocompose file, plus volume, fade out and intro/outro options.

SB ships with a nice library of score files for use with autocompose, 40 in all, that cover a wide range of content and should be enough to get many people up and running. A trip to Adobe’s online Resource Central (via WINDOW > Resource Central… ) online offered additional sound effects (which seem free), and additional score categories (some for sale and some presumably free).

Bottom Line:

While this is an appealing first release, we are troubled by it being the only audio application included with an otherwise powerful multimedia suite. Adobe is sending mixed messages here, mixing high end specialty tools into the same package it puts an entry level product like this. They don’t mesh well in real life.

At this point in time Soundbooth is fine for the consumer, hobbyists, and probably a good bet for wedding videographers. On a higher professional level this will not take you very far and in fact we would immediately consider adding a second audio application to your toolset. Even adding the wonderful open source (read: free) Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) would bring in many needed controls.