Adobe has released a preview of Soundbooth, their new audio editing software. Being that I used to be involved in audio production and sound design (check out my music site) I look forward to trying this one out for myself.

After a quick and easy install my first test was to see what file types Soundbooth supports and I was happy to see that 24bit .wav files are supported as well as most other standard audio file formats. A quick peek in the effects panel reveals that Soundbooth provides some basic audio effects such as chorus, flanger, vibrato and analog delay. The effect algorithms closely model their hardware equivalents and are a pretty good match in comparison to most effect units available today. However, the lack of a reverb unit is a bit of a let down. All of the effects render rather quickly compared to most other audio editors in the same product range. The zooming features take a bit of getting used to but they work just fine for a quick audio editor. I was also very happy to see that the app has yet to crash, which is pretty common amongst audio editors in general.

All in all I would recommend using Soundbooth for quick and easy audio edits as that seems to be it’s strongest point, and being that I am used to using Wavelab and other high end audio editors says alot about Soundbooth. I am happy with my initial test of soundbooth and look forward to seeing the product develop. You should definitely give it a try.

It is really cool to see everything finally coming together and all of the pieces falling into place. Adobe has been doing a great job as far as I a concerned. We now have a solid framework in which to build robust applications – Flex 2.0 built on Eclipse, as well as the Flex 2 SDK allowing anyone to develop applications in ActionScript and compile Flash content. Photoshop will now integrate seamlessly into Flash Professional 9 allowing designers, animators and developers to have a truly integrated work flow. Dreamweaver is being geared towards enforcing best practices in regards to css and xhtml validation. The Spry framework provides a framework for developing AJAX applications, the FlexAJAXBridge fills the gap between Flex apps and AJAX apps rather than building around proprietary technologies. And then there are all of the other things such as ASDoc which is invaluable in my opinion, the acquisition of Iteration 2 and Cairngorm becoming the defacto-standard micro architecture for Flex applications, and so on and so on… And now Adobe has added an audio application to fit the audio gap. And so it is really all coming together nicely.

Things have come along way in a short amount of time and it all seems to be for the better. It feels like just yesterday that the plans of the acquisition were announced. This is a great time to be a Flash Platform Developer – enjoy it.