January 22, 2008
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.
January 16, 2008
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.
January 3, 2008
Happy New Year to everyone! I know it’s been pretty quiet on the blog front lately. Who knew that things would stay so busy after we shipped Audition?
In any case, as with most everyone the New Year is a time for me to reflect on the previous twelve months and look forward to the next twelve. For the audio team 2007 was definitely a great, if exhausting, year. It was a real thrill to bring a brand new product to market with Soundbooth, and equally fun to ship what we think is a killer new version of Audition just a few months later. One of my personal measures of job satisfaction comes from seeing an ever-increasing number of people use and enjoy products I worked to create. Having two audio products in the stable for different kinds of folks means that we’re touching more people than ever before, and the strong uptake of Audition 3 by old and new customers alike has been a real thrill.
Looking forward, I always try to predict what the year will bring and I’m almost always wrong on more than half of it! We’ve got some cool things planned and I’ll look forward to sharing more when I can… In the meantime, I’ve been remiss in linking to some of the articles that you might find interesting. Today, I’ve got three reviews of Audition 3:
I think Bob’s review is particularly interesting because he sees Audition through new eyes as a general designer. Also, Gary’s review comes from the perspective of a video pro and so he talks more about the relationship between Soundbooth and Audition and why Adobe “bothers” to have two audio products.
I hope you all have a wonderful, prosperous, and great sounding New Year!
November 9, 2007
We’re pleased to announce that Adobe Audition 3 is now shipping. We really think this is a killer release with something (or many somethings) for everyone, from old hands to newcomers alike. The information about the release is up at the main Audition page or you can go directly to the “what’s new” page. We also have the trial version posted. It’s fully functional for 30 days so you can dig into the product and really see for yourself whether it’s what you need.
Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a party this afternoon I need to get ready for! 
October 27, 2007
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.
October 2, 2007
I’m back in the office this morning and just trying to dig back out–it’ll take a while. But right there at the top of my email queue was a note that George Petersen over at Mix has posted his take on the beta of Audition 3 that we sent over to him a while back. Enjoy!
September 6, 2007
It’s been especially hard to keep my mouth shut about this one lately, but I’m thrilled to report that we announced Adobe Audition 3 this morning. The team is especially proud of this release, not just because of overcoming the challenge of producing it at the same time as Soundbooth, but mainly because it adds both brand new exciting capabilities and polishes existing workflows. Take a look at the new features summary, or the more thorough What’s New PDF, to see what we’ve added–we think there’s something for everyone.
Some of the highlights include:
- MIDI recording and editing in a piano roll sequencer
- VSTi support
- Spectral frequency selection paintbrush
- Spectral frequency healing brush
- Marque editing in the spectral pan and phase displays
- Multitrack auto-crossfades and fade handles on every clip
- Grouped-clip editing in the multitrack view
- New effects including Convolution Reverb, Analog Delay, a new Mastering tool, and a Guitar Suite
- Time stretching using the Radius engine from iZotope
- A dedicated top/tail view in the edit view for tuning the start and end of a file
- On-clip controls for volume and fades in the edit view
- New Adaptive Noise Reduction and Phase Correction tools
- Improved performance with N-core support in the mixing engine
We should be shipping well before the end of the year–I’d say in or before November. The price remains the same at
$349 US, and we have a
$99 upgrade for anyone who has a previous version of Audition, even if it came as part of a collection or suite. You can
pre-order now if you’d like, and there will be a demo version posted at or around the time we ship.
More personally, this rounds out quite a year for me and for the whole audio team. It’s been an exhausting, challenging, exhilarating ride trying to bring a new take on audio to the world at the same time we were advancing a well-loved product to the next level. I couldn’t be more proud of the team and, while there are always things we wished we could have done better, and others we wish we had done more or less of, on the whole I hope you’ll agree that this is a bang-up release for our audio workhorse and a huge step forward for Adobe in audio. Now I’m going to take my fatigue, my wife, and myself on a vacation so don’t be surprised if this spot is dark for a little while. More news when I return!
August 27, 2007
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.
August 3, 2007
I just realized that I’ve been remiss in not linking to the excellent Video Workshop that we have posted online at the Adobe Design Center. The Video Workshop is a one-stop shop for all of the videos we have on all the CS3 applications (19 applications in all!) Soundbooth has its own section with a some great introductory how-to videos.
I’m clearly lacking in timeliness, but Bruce Williams’ podcast series Building the Pod has hit a milestone with its 100th podcast. (Congrats Bruce…and now I see you’ve already moved on to episode 101). Anyway, what’s exciting is this is Bruce’s first venture into video podcasts, and he’s set up a great episode where he takes a promo and remixes it, explaining what he’s doing at every step. If you’ve ever wanted to just watch someone work to learn their tricks of the trade, this is a great place to watch.
