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[ In Focus ] |
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Soundbooth suffers from missing features
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by Wayne Cole
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Adobe made no secret of its intention to replace Audition with Soundbooth in its Creative Suite 3 release. There was even a lengthy public beta test period that saw three releases and fostered a lively beta user forum. Implicit in many of the posts were suspicions about Adobe's motives.
One odd aspect of Audition is that the splash screen, unlike all other Adobe titles, doesn't list the developers. This led some to believe that those developers "walked" when Adobe acquired Syntrillium Software and its flagship product, Cool Edit Pro, which was renamed Audition.
The speculation is that, having lost the Cool Edit expertise, Adobe decided to replace Audition with a ground-up audio program that had a more Adobe-esque look and feel. The timing, however, required many features to be left out in order to make the CS3 release dates with something that resembled a working program.
The cover story was that video editors really didn't need a full-fledged audio editor and only wanted very basic tools. Much of the traffic on the Soundbooth beta forum shot gaping holes in this rationale.
Multi-track mixing was the first glaring omission -- Soundbooth only supports editing for a single stereo track. Another concern for some users was the dumbing down of filters, especially for noise reduction and sound restoration. Admittedly, Audition had many filters that would puzzle users who were not audio engineers. But Adobe went overboard in dumping, renaming, and reconfiguring its filter options.
For example, Audition's Time Stretch dialog contained three well labeled, easily understood stretch mode options. "Time Stretch" preserved pitch, "Pitch Shift" preserved tempo, and "Resample" preserved neither. Combined with the control to set the time stretch amount either as a percentage or an actual number of seconds with single sample accuracy, it was easy to obtain the necessary stretch. The "Resample" is particularly useful for forensics where an audio track may have been recorded by a high-speed tape recorder at a speed that standard playback machines cannot achieve.
In Soundbooth, all the controls for time stretching (not just those named above) were replaced by a "New Duration" time control, a "Time Stretch" control that goes from 13 to 800 percent, and a "Pitch Shift" control that goes from -36 to +36. Don't ask what units those are -- no one seems to know.
If you want to resample in Soundbooth, you have to fiddle with the Time and Pitch sliders and try to find a combination that allows the track to be stretched in such a way that the "chipmunk" voices begin to sound like intelligible human speech. To clarify, this is not easier than clicking a single radio button control as you would do in Audition.
While the removal of features and changing of labels to inscrutable phrases is bad enough, Adobe compounded the problem by considerably lowering the quality of the edited audio. With my test file, a suspect interview inadvertently recorded at 7x real time with lots of air conditioning and other fan noise included, I couldn't recover an intelligible interrogation using Soundbooth's time stretch and noise reduction filters.
Using Audition to stretch the audio track from its high-speed, five-minute duration to its "real world" 35 minutes with one pass of noise reduction, I was able to recover the interrogation and complete the process with fewer keystrokes and mouse clicks. Plus, the processing took much less time in Audition than it did in Soundbooth.
In spite of maintaining the very useful spectral display and creating a overall interface that is more like other Adobe applications, the removal of features, lowering of processing quality, and increased difficulty in understanding option labels results in an audio program that is lacking for many professional audio applications, particularly for forensic work.
Hopefully, Adobe's public statements on the Soundbooth design goals don't reflect the company's true attitude toward a professional audio editing package for video content producers. And hopefully, all Soundbooth's missing features (particularly multi-track editing and mixing) and quality shortcomings are corrected for its next release. If not, many Adobe Creative Suite users may leave the reservation to find worthy audio editors from other developers.
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