Adobe Soundbooth Beta

Adobe has come up with a feature-rich and user-friendly sound editor,

Soundbooth (Beta 2). It is so simple that even an amateur can use it. However,

it is still in the Beta stage and you can expect to do much more with it in the

full version. The Adobe Soundbooth interface has lots of Windows embedded, which

can be fully customized.

Just like in Photoshop, Adobe has introduced the 'History' window that

lets you go back and forward to any desired editing step. The sound timeline can

be zoomed in and out with the mouse scroller, which makes it simple. All the

basic buttons of a sound editor like play/pause and record buttons are included

on the lower panel of the interface. If your interface workspace gets too

cluttered or confusing, you can simply click on the reset workspace button that

takes you back to the default workspace settings.

Multiple sound files can be opened in the same interface and you can copy and paste a portion from one to another

Soundbooth supports most of the sound and music file formats like WMV, WMA

and WAV, but sadly you cannot edit or save in MP3 format. Among others, one good

feature is noise reduction. It gets rid of the noise in the backdrop of a

recorded music piece. Other common tools are fade in/ fade out, louder tool and

the record tool. The latter lets you record running sound/music from your

Windows media player or via a mic. Other than the basic copy/paste feature of

sound, Adobe has added a 'Mix paste' feature through which you can increase

or decrease the volume of the sound part which is being pasted or the track on

which sound is being pasted on. This is a good option because if you are working

on 2 different tracks, they might be having different volume levels, so via Mix

paste you can adjust volume accordingly.

Lots of effects can be found such as the vocal enhancer with which one can

enhance the male, female sound or music volume. These effects are available as

basic effects and also on the advanced level (with extra features) on the 'Effects'

menu. Markers can be added for easy references with which you can keep track of

those important key points where editing needs to be done.

As compared to other sound editors such as Song Sound Forge, this one's

catching up with new features like Mix edit and History. But more work is needed

in terms of getting support for sound formats.

Bottom Line: This simple and easy to use sound editor looks promising

in Beta. The full version is expected to have more features, especially support

for MP3 format.

Sulabh Puri