Adobe Soundbooth: Professional quality audio

Oct 12, 2009 at 11:47 am by staff


At heart, I’m a print guy. Sure, I get invited to speak and write on online topics quite a bit, but it’s the written word that I love ... written on paper.

However, I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck and I know the importance of having a Web site that doesn’t feel as if it was designed by a seventh grader.

Newspapers usually sense the importance of videos, animated ads and headlines on their sites. But they often overlook an important aspect: audio.

There are lots of ways to create audio for Web sites. If you want to get past the sound created using freeware applications or the audio programs that are built into most computers, consider Adobe Soundbooth.

I could create a list of Soundbooth features, but since most of my readers aren’t professional sound engineers let me keep it simple: Audio created in Soundbooth sounds great. Whether you’re improving the sound in a video, creating a podcast or whatever, you’ll feel like you’re working in a professional sound studio when you hear what comes from Soundbooth.

For those audio pros out there, allow me to mention a few features:

Recording and mixing audio clips: Record high-quality mono or stereo audio files, and work on more than one file at a time. Match the volume levels within a single clip or across multiple audio files.

Fast audio cleanup: Use powerful, sample-accurate tools to cut, copy, paste, fade, and stretch audio assets. Intuitive on-clip tools make common edits remarkably easy, and visual feedback keeps you informed at every step.

Multitrack support: Multitrack support allows you to create sounds composed of multiple clips and to mix multiple tracks and scores.

Speech search: Turn spoken dialogue into text-based metadata that makes your video searchable.

Visual tools for healing sound: Use tools like those in Adobe Photoshop software to visually identify, select and remove unwanted sounds.

Combined with my Plantronics 355 multimedia headset and iMac, Soundbooth provides everything I need to create high-quality recordings. And, if you’re lucky, you might already have a copy of Soundbooth lying around. It comes with three variations of CS4.

Available separately for $199, Soundbooth is available on both the Mac and PC platforms. For more information about Soundbooth, visit adobe.com. To learn more about Plantronics headsets, visit plantronics.com and click on “Computer & Gaming.”



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