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 couldn't find the article online, but in the latest issue, Douglas Dixon does a full review of the Soundbooth beta. (It has Adobe Soundbooth listed on the top of the cover if you're looking for the right issue.) If you're a subscriber, or have access to a copy, you can check it out in the June issue. Douglas seemed to really like Soundbooth it, and concluded with
Soundbooth can result in a faster workflow and better-sounding audio for your video productions, from cleaner recorded sound to enhanced sound effects, to nicer background soundtracks.
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.
I have another few couple of blog posts for the roundup and your reading pleasure.
First, from CreateDigitalMusic.com, a summary of the launch details for Soundbooth and their take on summarizing our comparison between Soundbooth and Audition.
Second, a short blog post that I happened to like the title of. :)
Douglas Dixon at Manifest Technology has written up a great summary of the why and how for Soundbooth. If you're looking for a Soundbooth overview, this is a great one.
I realized today that I neglected to link to some videos I produced for Adobe's Edge newsletter in the January/Febuary issue. They cover some of the basics of using Soundbooth with a specific eye to tasks that Flash designers might need to tackle in a typical day. Each one is a few minutes long on these topics:
You can check out the Edge newsletter here, or jump straight to the videos on this page here.
Digital Pro Sound has posted a nice overview of how the AutoComposer in Soundbooth works. AutoComposer is designed so that you can customize Soundbooth Scores to match the mood you're looking for (not to mention the length) and Frank Moldstead walks through the basics while using one of the beta scores we've posted as his example.
Peter Kirn over at createdigitalmusic.com has posted his summary and comments on Soundbooth Beta 2. One of Peter's comments is:
"Here’s my impassioned plea to Adobe: please allow us to get Soundbooth unbundled from CS..."I've heard this from a couple other folks, and I can confirm that we plan on making Soundbooth available as a standalone product as well as part of the suite.
I'm pleased to announce that the second preview version of Soundbooth is now live on the Adobe Labs site! This beta has a bunch of new features, and almost every feature that was included in Beta 1 has been enhanced in some way (some obviously so and some behind the scenes).
I'd like to take a moment and thank all those who have sent in their suggestions, constructive criticisms, workflow explanations, and all the other impassioned feedback we've received over the last couple of months. This is the first time I've been part of a public beta like this, and a few months ago the idea made me more than a bit nervous, but it's been extremely gratifying to have the team able to engage with the community like this. We've been able to respond to many of the requests and comments, and have filed away a bunch more for the future. Beta 2 just wouldn't have been nearly as good without you.
So, what's new? The list I have from the team is over fifty features long, but here are some of the highlights:
As a reminder, the beta does not include all of the file formats that will be included in the final release version, including MP3, FLV, and H.264, or Bridge, which can be previewed in the current Photoshop CS3 public beta.
I hope you all try out this latest beta and continue to give us your feedback. Enjoy!
You can download the latest beta here. Both Mac and Windows builds are available.
Learn more about the Soundbooth beta.
Download the Soundbooth Getting Started Guide.
Join the discussion in the Labs forums.
I've noticed that there hasn't been as much discussion as we expected about Soundbooths AutoComposer feature and I realized that the downloads for the Soundbooth Scores are a little buried on Adobe Labs. We've added some more links (including a sticky post in the forum) to highlight them better, but I thought the best thing to do was to play with it myself and post some of my results.
First, some background: AutoComposer lets you open a special file, called a Soundbooth Score Template, that represents a whole song. The Scores are created and recorded by musicians but include a whole lot of metadata and a lot more audio than a normal, linear song. All that metadata and audio is arranged in a special way so that Soundbooth can adjust the length and some of the feel of the music based on input from you, but without requiring any specific musical knowledge to get good results.
What I did was take a video we've used in some demos and cut it down to about 40 seconds. I then used the AutoComposer to add three different soundtracks, one for each of the Soundbooth Scores we've posted on the Labs site. I also limited myself to spend no more than five minutes playing with each score to see what I could get done very quickly. I've linked to each of the results below. (I decided to link to them in another window so you wouldn't have to download them all if you didn't want to--make sure your pop-up blocker is off before you click.)
First, the original movie with a piece of the original soundtrack:
View Original Video
Now, this is the one I think turned out the best because the music is electronic, which matches the feel of the video:
Video with River of Unreality Score
And the other two scores. First, there's New York Night which is more "atmospheric" or "cinematic." It doesn't match the mood as well, but it still works:
Video with New York Night Score
And then there's Slow Dirty Funk, which is, well, you get the idea.
Video with Slow Dirty Funk Score
Go play around with them yourself and see what you can do! We plan on including dozens of these Soundbooth Scores with Soundbooth. Also, when we nail down the format completely (the Scores are in just as much beta as the software!) we'll release instructions so that anyone who is more comfortable with creating music can create their own for use in Soundbooth.
Big Bob D. gets two posts in a row for his prolific education attempts. He's just posted some of his perspectives on Soundbooth over at his blog, along with a few tips on what it can do for folks who haven't taken a look at it yet.
With everythign else that's going on I'm days behind in the Soundbooth coverage out there, but here are a bunch more links to articles, posts, and mini-reviews/previews. As always let me know in the comments if you've seen a good post on Soundbooth and I'll include it in my next roundup.
John Nack has commented as a long-time Mac user in the Soundbooth forums as well as on his blog on the subject of Soundbooth's support of only Intel-based Macs. His post is worth a read, but one of the comments on his blog sums up a lot of frustration people are expressing:
The use of Xcode means that, afaik, the creation of a universal binary would've required Adobe to click a check box before compiling. They chose not to, and that is what upsets people, I believe.
Oh how I wish this were true. As I said originally, we really wanted to make a PPC version but the "make universal" checkbox simply wouldn't work for us. If it would I'd be in there yelling for our engineers to check it and get me a PPC version--I'm not in the habit of passing up potential customers! However, as has been pointed out elsewhere we have buckets of Intel-specific code for modules in Soundbooth that would all have to be re-written to work on PPC chips. The spectral view and the edits you can do there are a good example of something that could work on the PPC but would be so dog slow as to be worthless without this kind of work. We leverage this sort of Intel expertise all over the application.
Even if we could check the box to produce a PPC version, and dedicate engineers to re-write all that Intel-specifc code, most people don't consider the impact that has on testing and quality assurance--which is a non-trivial part of getting a release out. (Just ask our QA team who worked through the weekend tracking down issues to get the public beta out last week). A different chip architecture means a different test bed, which in turn means a lot of additional testing time. Every aspect of the application has to be re-verified--all that Intel-specific code we would have re-written for PPC would have inevitably introduced new bugs and testers are rightfully distrustful of the idea of "oh, don't worry, the software will work the same on both chips." Engineers can write all the code in the world, but without a good QA team running through all of it you probably wouldn't want to buy what they produce...
All of that is to say that creating a PPC version would have been possible, but it would have taken considerable resources for our team. We used our PPC/Intel analysis as part of our platform decisions and balanced that with all the other things that go into a software release: our desired feature set, how much time we'd take to stamp out bugs to reach our high quality standards, how many people we have on the team to work on it, and when did we need to ship it in order to capitalize on the opportunity.
People talk of a monolithic Adobe but we're made up of dozens of product teams, some smaller than others. As a team we looked at all the factors and concluded that we could make this app but we'd have to give up some significant things. The two huge things that hit the cutting room floor were PPC support and several dozen features we all desperately wanted but simply couldn't get done. They were excruciating choices, and people will argue we should have made different decisions instead. That's what making software is like.
A few more articles and posts for your reading pleasure.
I got a great tip pointing me to a great summary and mini-review of Soundbooth up on Createdigitalmusic.com. Peter Kirn walks through what Soundbooth can do now, as well as some of his thoughts on the future direction and his own feature requests. It's worth a read if you're curious about what you can do with the beta already.
Thanks for the tip, Charlie!
I've been getting notes from folks all day pointing out different news sites and blogs that have picked up on Soundbooth. There's an amazing amount being written about it! Too much for me to even keep on (I'll have plenty to read this weekend, I suppose!) Here's what I had in my inbox by 11am this morning!
Even more coming soon. Let me know in the comments if you've seen any interesting mentions of Soundbooth.
It's an exciting day for the audio team--we just posted a beta of a brand new application, Adobe Soundbooth, to Adobe Labs for everyone to check out! Soundbooth is built for creative pros and developers who don't have a background in audio but need to get audio tasks done quickly anyway. When we went out and visited customers who are doing video and web (especially Flash) work we found that most of you needed to do your own audio work regularly, but were using a hodgepodge of tools to get the job done--and none of those tools felt comfortable.
Soundbooth is our answer for that. Pros that are familiar with other Adobe applications can get going quickly using new on-clip elements for editing as well as a task-based approach to organizing the tools for things like noise reduction and creating music. We've tried to make it as fast as possible to get in, get your work done, and get out while making sure the tools are powerful, intuitive and discoverable.
For a lot of you I can predict that the first question you have is, "Does this replace Audition?" and the answer is resounding NO. The team is at work on Audition right now and we have some great stuff planned. Audition will continue to be available for people who are more audio-centric and want a product focused on audio production.
Click through for my answers to a few more of the questions I bet you have...