Inside Sound

A longtime Audition fan, Justin Lassen used Audition 3 to help him mix a lot of fantastic soundtracks for a new Clive Barker movie called The Midnight Meat Train. The movie is scheduled for limited release on August 1. Justin did a lot of the prep work and the finalization of the various individual tracks with Audition 3. Check out the movie soundtrack at: http://www.myspace.com/midnightmeattrainsoundtrack

Asked what he likes most about Audition 3, Justin said, “I like using Adobe Audition to edit individual multitracks before mixing them all down to a pre-master. The mixer interface is perfect for this! I love the ability to effect each track in real-time. I also utilized all of the effects and the new virtual instrument features as well as editing tools, which Audition is famous for! This software is killer amazing and super fast!”

“For this project, I found Audition to be extremely useful when I needed to edit, mix-down and tweak hundreds of individual master tracks from all the band's songs (which were being shipped to me from all over the world during production and in various audio formats). It was fast, reliable and lifesaving. The delays, reverbs, distortion and compression suites all came in handy when I needed to crunch some of the performances to match the vibe of the film, as well as finding obscure yet accessible sound design for each individual remix. The combinations of all those textures worked their dark charms into my work beautifully.”

Thanks to Justin for giving us an inside look at how he uses Audition to create killer movie soundtracks. To check out more of his work, go to his official website at http://www.empireofmodernthought.com or his blog at http://www.justinlassen.com

Check out his interview at http://www.generatenoise.com/2008/08/01/interview-meat-train-ost-composer-justin-lassen/

Louise

Posted by Louise Ping at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here’s a link to the MacWorld First Looks at the beta of the next version of Soundbooth.
http://www.macworld.com/article/133606/2008/05/soundboothcs4beta.html

All in all it’s a good review. The one thing I did want to respond to were the reviewer’s comments about the new speech search feature.

The reviewer’s results in creating speech to text transcripts were only about 50% accurate. The accuracy of the transcripts generated by the speech engine will vary depending on the quality of the audio and the type of speech. It will work best with broadcast quality audio like news feeds. One way to test this is to pick up a newspaper or magazine and record your own voice reading a news article. There you will see results in the 90% accuracy range. (Any USB mic will work fine for this and if you don’t have one Blue Microphones makes a couple very nice affordable USB mics called the Snowball and the Snowflake).

Now as the reviewer noted even with a 50% accurate transcript the speech engine will capture enough keywords to enable you to easily search through your audio stream. This really speaks to the heart of what makes this new feature so valuable. Speech search is about speeding up the editing process by enabling you to easily locate specific words in your audio clips. Also, with the new metadata panel you can easily correct words in the transcript. For each word there will be a confidence rating displayed giving you an indication of whether the word is accurate or not.

The other thing to note about the speech engine is that is has different language models including ones to cover different dialects. This will give you more accurate results when you have speakers with an Australian or British accent. For the beta we only ship the American English language model, but other language models will be available with the shipping release.

Posted by Lawson Hancock at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)