Review: Adobe Soundbooth
I had a chance to test Soundbooth out for both recording and editing off and on for the last two weeks and I'll be the first to tell you Soundbooth is no Audition and it falls short of any expectations I had.
I know it's a beta, but I was actually disappointed with it. It's actually very limited and isn't very feature-rich. First off is that it's not a multitrack editor so if you put your audio or podcast together in pieces with several audio elements, you won't be able to do it in Soundbooth.
It serves pretty much only as a single track editor so you could edit your podcast recording (in my case) and take out any dead space or any other editing tasks and then put the edited files from soundbooth together with your production elements in a multitrack editor like Audacity, Garageband, or Soundtrack Pro. It does have some included tools like noise and click/pop removal, but I actually prefer the ones in Soundtrack Pro and Bias' Sound Soap. I found both the audio cleaning features hard to train to do what I wanted and it was hard to find a spot where it was actually removing the noise without removing parts of the audio that I wanted.
There are also effects that you can add to your audio, but I usually don't mess with these much. They were similar to the effects in Soundtrack Pro and in fact the UI, while nice, looks a lot like soundtrack pro and I think it makes a poor attempt at being the single track version of Soundtrack Pro, and you also can't import mp3's, so you have to take a compressed MP3, convert it to wave just to recompress back into mp3 later.
I like Audition on the PC much better than Soundbooth so far and I think they would be far more successful porting it to OS X. There are a lot of other single track editors out there that do a much better job and have support for VST and DSP editing like RMS Normalization. I would choose Peak LE, Amadeus Pro, Fission and Sound Studio all before Soundbooth and there are a lot of multitrack editors that offer the same and even more features.
The beta 2 is now out aver at Adobe Labs. If you have an intel mac, go download it, give it a try and share your opinions with me/
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