Software Editorial has posted another review and overview of Soundbooth. The reviewer concludes with:
SoundBooth CS3 provides all the necessary tools without confusing the user, and enables good quality audio to be a part of a professional video presentation.
Cool!
Today I saw that Matt Armstrong over at Studio Daily has posted a short video tutorial on using Soundbooth’s Noise Reduction. It looks like the video is taken from a longer training series from classondemand.com. I’m not familiar with their training series, but it looks like they cover a bunch of titles.
Yesterday we rolled out an update to Resource Central, the live Internet-connected panel inside of Soundbooth. The update refreshed the interface, making it much easier to search and browse through available sound effects, Soundbooth Scores, and news items. Some people don’t realize that Soundbooth comes with access to more than 3,000 sound effects–just search for and download them from Resource Central!
Resource Central is a new idea for a lot of users (and Adobe!) and I think it’s an exciting glimpse into the future. A lot of people talk about the future of software services and how they’re taking over, but we know that it’ll be a long time before a browser-based application can handle everything an application like Soundbooth is capable of. But I think we’ll see the hybrid approach that Resource Central points to in more and more applications–you can already the trend at its extreme with apps like Google Earth. All the heavy lifting on the graphics happens on your local machine, but all the data comes down from servers. It’s no surprise that Adobe’s betting big on this trend with AIR, which is specifically for building connected applications that run on your desktop.
In any case, Resource Central is a toe in the water for the audio team and we’re excited to refresh it in the middle of the product cycle like this. If you have Soundbooth make sure to give it a try and download a few effects.
It looks like the fine folks over at Total Training have released their “essentials” training for Soundbooth CS3. I haven’t seen this one, but based on their previous releases I’m sure it’s a great training series. It clocks in at 2.5 hours and is available online as standalone training or on DVD as part of the Production Premium training set.
Yesterday Apple released OS X 10.5, better known as Leopard. There’s a lot of great stuff in there for the Mac-toting crowd (personally, I’m most looking forward to one of the small things: “stacks” in the dock) but unfortunately late builds of Leopard also introduced an incompatibility with some of our applications, including Soundbooth.
For the most part, Soundbooth seems to work fine in Leopard but there are two things that might get you into trouble.
First, Soundbooth will likely crash if you select “System Default Input/Output” in either the Soundbooth preferences dialog or in the recording dialog. This is not selected by default, and if you select any other choice for your audio hardware Soundbooth still works fine.
Second, Soundbooth may crash when you quit the application if the video window open and undocked. This crash doesn’t appear to hurt Soundbooth or your system (since it only happens when you’re quitting the app) but it can be annoying.
Our team is working on a patch right now and we expect to have it out and available in December. Until then, if you avoid the two scenarios above you shouldn’t have any problem with Soundbooth in Leopard. You can check out the Adobe Leopard FAQ for more information about all of our products.
I’m happy to say that we’ve posted the toolkit for creating Soundbooth Scores to the Adobe Developer Center today! The toolkit contains a small add-on for Soundbooth as well as a set of instructions for how to produce your own Soundbooth Scores (from how to structure the recording to how to break up the files for use in the toolkit). Note that the process is fairly involved, both from a musical and technical standpoint, and is intended for folks who already create sample libraries and such to be able to create Soundbooth Scores as well. But if you want to give it a shot yourself, or peak under the covers to see how they’re put together, the toolkit is posted on the Adobe Devnet now. There is no charge for downloading or using the toolkit.
For those of you who haven’t played with the AutoCompser yet, it allows non-musicians to load a fully composed piece of music (a Soundbooth Score) and then adjust how it sounds to match the mood and feel of your project. If you want to see more there’s a section of the product tour that shows how it works.
If you do go and produce a Soundbooth Score you’d like to share, let me know here at the blog or link to it over on our Adobe Soundbooth User-to-User forums.
I just got word that the Soundbooth training on Lynda.com has gone live as of today. The training is done by the same Bruce Williams who performed the Audition training, and while I haven’t seen all of the Soundbooth movies I’m guessing they’re the same high-quality training I’ve come to expect from Lynda.com trainers. If you’re looking for some more how-tos than what come with Soundbooth then it’s definitely worth considering.
Now that Soundbooth is shipping the official user-to-user forum is open. I’ve never launched a true “version 1″ at Adobe before–the forum looks so empty! Quick, someone go over there and start discussing! 
The beta forum from the Labs releases of Soundbooth is still up but only for the next few days.
I’m pleased to say that as of today Soundbooth CS3 (and Adobe Production Premium and Master Collection) are shipping! There are a whole pile of pre-orders that need to clear out first, so if this goes anything like the Audition 2 launch it’ll take a week or so to clear all those out–expect a few days of delay if you order the box. The download version should be available immediately, though.
Huzzah!
I just realized that my post that was supposed to go up last Monday, well, didn’t. The big news is that we have new preview releases up on the Adobe Labs site! Posted as of Monday the 16th (all in Mac and Win versions) are:
For those of you who are curious to get your hands on what’s new, or want to have the thrill of running Premiere Pro on your Mac for the first time, should go check them out.
