Product Reviews

Soundbooth is an entirely new application, available both standalone and as part of the larger Adobe Production Premium bundle. Effectively replacing the recording-orientated Audition, its big sell is simplicity: an audio editor for those who are more used to video. As such, it's largely task based, favouring commands such as "make it louder" rather than referring to gain or attenuation.

As with the rest of the CS3 family, it uses collapsible, movable and dockable palettes. By default, the left side is given over to a file list of open files and their attributes, with a tabbed task pane below and the usual History pane at the bottom. This lists the unlimited non-destructive undo steps that will be a godsend for the inexperienced and a comfort blanket for the inveterate tweaker.

Soundbooth aims to cover audio processing from recording to basic mastering, although the scope is restricted - most notably, it's limited to single-pass recording. It can handle six-channel audio with the right hardware so you can edit a 5.1 mix, but with no control over individual channels and no monitoring facilities it's a strictly non-multitrack setup. Format support is limited too - there's no support for AAC, MP3 or even MPEG4, although export options via Media Encoder are more generous.

Editing is made as simple as possible. You can fine-tune selection limits on the timeline at the top, crop using markers alongside the waveform display, and add linear and logarithmic fades by just dragging icons at the beginning and end of the file. The main waveform display does take a traditional all-in-one approach, though, rather than the segments that video editors would be more used to. This keeps everything focused, but makes cross-fading between edits all but impossible.

Cut-and-paste work proved simple, although

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the cursor-placement model can be tricky to get to grips with. Playback is also sluggish to start, making skipping between different parts of a long file tedious. Edits are automatically made using zero-crossing points, and unlike Sony's Sound Forge this can't be turned off, but it does ensure most edits are glitch free.

The spectrographic display is more than just a pretty distraction. Frequency is shown on the vertical axis, time horizontally, with amplitude (volume) indicated by colour - the brighter the louder. Restricted frequency sounds (such as ringing phones or clock chimes) can literally be painted out using a vertical selection tool or the spot-healing brush, silencing the selecting frequency band or adjusting their amplitude by a granularity of plus or minus 0.1dB - very powerful.

There's also an excellent noise-reduction tool, which comes with both presets and a very effective noise-print facility. Again, the control is limited to sensitivity and amount, but it's generally all you need for day-to-day cleanup.

There's also competent click and pop removal, formant-based pitch-shifting, timing correction and a score generator, the latter of which uses another series of sliders to produce a tailored soundbed to an accompanying video - useful, if limited, for when you're in a hurry.

On the mixdown front, there's Chorus/Flanger, Compressor, Convolution Reverb, Distortion, Dynamics, EQ: Parametric, EQ: Graphic, Mastering, Phaser, Vocal Enhancer, plus advanced versions of all but the last.

The idea of a one-click "mastering" plug-in will cause audio engineers to fall off their chairs, but if used with care it can be effective. The advanced version of the plug-in reveals it to be made up of a high- and low-pass peaking filter with adjustable Q, a basic room reverb, a stereo widener, acoustic exciter and a hard limiter. Even in this form, each module is generally a one-slider affair. It's an impressive paring down, though, and should be enough for most needs.

The overall concept of Soundbooth makes a lot of sense, but it's nothing without a semi-decent recording in the first place: many effects will dramatically lose their effectiveness, with anything too extreme in terms of dynamics simply foxing it and inaudible speech remaining so. But if you're primarily dealing with voice-based or basic soundtrack work, Soundbooth will be a breath of fresh air.