Adobe soundbooth pros and cons

Soundbooth never allowed for multitrack editing. You had to edit every individual track instead. It incorporates recording markers. It allows for complex audio editing to occur with simple functionality. It still offers video-centric integration. There are some disadvantages which must be considered as well. I also appreciate the ability to mute and unmute grouped clips. As for CD burning, there are audio editors who need to burn their projects in Redbook-compatible format.

There are new features as well. Audition now includes a media browser—a pane used to navigate to the audio and video assets on your drive. I found it helpful for locating assets I use from one project to another—audio bumpers and music, for instance. And it provides a lot of useful information about those assets—the media type, duration, sample rate, number of channels, and bit depth, for example.

Its most helpful feature is the ability to save assets as shortcuts. For example, save a folder full of bumpers as a shortcut and easily call it up when working on another project that requires them. My one beef with the media browser is that you must navigate through a folder hierarchy to locate your files. You can easily group non-continguous clips in multiple tracks. Using it you can select audio that you intend to cut. But before actually making that cut, you can ask Audition to skip over the selection on playback.

And you can perform keyframe volume adjustment by clicking points on a volume timeline within an audio track and then dragging that point up or down to increase or decrease volume respectively over time. To do much more than add fades, adjust volume, cut and paste entire audio tracks, and reposition tracks in the timeline, you must open the track in a separate edit panel. Once this panel is open you can then add markers and effects to the track, cut and paste portions of an audio track, and ask Soundbooth to transcribe audio to text.

Many Soundbooth users will likely find the inability to perform these kinds of tasks while simultaneously viewing all other tracks confusing. Why make users take an extra step to do this? Although you can navigate through markers when viewing the entire multitrack project using the keyboard, it would be nice to be able to see the names of your markers in the timeline and Markers panel when you have the multitrack view open.

Other audio editors work this way and Soundbooth should as well. In addition to multitrack editing, Soundbooth CS4 introduces speech transcription, volume matching, non-destructive editing, and MP3 compression preview. Audition does that work in a fraction of the time. Also, when applying a processor intensive effect—which, under Soundbooth, would completely tie up the application until the processing was done—you can continue to do other things in your project while Audition renders the effect.

I found that opening a complex Audition project in Adobe Premier Pro can take several minutes, though all the elements eventually make their way to Premiere. Stereo clips and tracks are converted to mono, overlapping clips are combined, no effects and EQ are exported, and you lose all your automation envelopes except clip volume and mono-to-stereo track panning.

While I produced a couple of good-sounding podcasts that could have been more troublesome with GarageBand, there were some features I missed. As I mentioned, it would be nice to have a window that contains frequently used clips—commercials or background music that you use time and again. I also wish that I was able to preview clips within the Files panel. When you have a couple of dozen clips with names like Bumper01, Bumper02, and Bumper03, it would helpful to be able to quickly preview them in order to tell which is which.

Audition offers no support for enhanced podcasts—podcasts that you add chapters, images, and links to—so I had to take my finished audio work and import it into GarageBand where I could add these elements.

I often move between these two views when editing and being able to keep an eye on one view while working in another is useful. And for them, this version of Audition is likely a dead end as it offers no support for such hardware.