Adobe Soundbooth CS4 review

It's an intriguing technology, and potentially very useful when handling large amounts of dialogue. But we found the US English language recognition library provided with our review copy rather inaccurate with our British English test dialogue. Fortunately, you can correct the text by editing it.

There are sundry other workflow tweaks, which make the interface look less sparse than its predecessor. The MP3 compression preview when you save into this format is just one of the welcome smaller touches. And it all goes together to make this second outing for Soundbooth feel much more rounded than its predecessor.

It's still very much targeted at working with other Adobe software, and a few holes in its toolset remain - there's no option to reverse audio and play it backwards, for example. But the multi-track ability, volume-related tools and greater interoperability via Dynamic Link are all useful improvements and go together to make it well worth the upgrade from CS3.

Author: James Morris