Besides the icons—which look disgusting btw—the biggest disappointment in my eyes is Soundbooth.
With all these amazing programs getting a substantial number of new amazing features… Soundbooth was hiding in the background. There are only three new features listed on Adobe’s site are:
- Being able to change the height of tracks in multitrack view
- Being able to split a sound in half (CTRL/CMD+K)
- More royalty-free sound effects and Soundbooth Scores
Three new features. That’s it.
Adobe is typically known for it’s innovation—pushing boundaries. What’s going on here?
A few years ago, Adobe purchased a program called “Cool Edit Pro” and rebranded it as Audition and stuck it in their CS2, and CS3. This precursor to Soundbooth was a bit bloated, but was a very powerful audio editing and mixing tool. It allowed you to quickly target and select audio channels (left or right). It had a bunch of great audio filters, things like “Invert” which is great for sound cancellation, as well as pitch tools for warping the pitch over time (for example, the way a turntable winds down).
CS4 comes around, and we get a new boiled-down, insanely basic piece of software called Soundbooth. The Creative Suite is full of fully-fledged massive amazing software… so why add a basic, boiled down program. It doesn’t make sense…
The only reason I can think of that they did this is that Auditon was a Windows-only piece of software, and it was probably easier to build a new program from the ground. Fair enough… I just wish they wouldn’t have slacked off. So many essential tools and filters are still missing… even for “basic” users who aren’t audio producers. Heck, free programs like Audacity can do more than Soundbooth can.
And sure, Audition still exists… but it hasn’t been updated in a while (to the best of my knowledge), and it is a little too expensive after already purchasing an entire suite.
Don’t get me wrong… I’ve learned to love Soundbooth. It’s the only program I’ve been able to find that allows me to edit audio spectrally. It’s amazing the sounds you can remove by editing a spectral waveform. I’ve been able to seamlessly remove birds, nose whistles, camera clacking, microphone popping, wind rumble, and other distractions. The only problem is that it takes forever. Imagine removing the moon against a gradient sky from a photograph photo-realistically… using only the pencil tool in Microsoft Paint. Defnintely not impossible, but it would take hours.
The next logical step in Soundbooth’s progression would be to add a spectral healing/cloning brush tool. This would set Soundbooth so far above any program I’ve ever seen. Right now, sound can really only be removed… it can’t be added (specularly). If someone coughs (outside, with moderate background noise), I can try to remove it at a spectral level, but what I will be left with is this sort of robotic echoing ghost of the cough. Reason being, “Remove a Sound” only really reduces the volume of a sound based on the volume on either side of the noise. The actual pulsations of the wave still exist, but the volume is reduced.
It would be so easy to just sample an empty area of sound and paint over top of the sound I want to remove.
So yeah, this post is running long, and I doubt anyone will ever read this…
…but yeah. Not so impressed with the lack of innovation
Culprits: YouTube; CollegeHumor; DailyMotion
It would be great to be able to dynamically feather a path in Photoshop. Take the image to the right for example. It would be difficult to select this shape with the Pen Tool, since it’s a vector tool. After the path is created, you would have to manually blur the edges of the selection using Lens Blur or the blur tool. This is not ideal. It would be great to have the ability to go back and use some sort of bezier curves to dynamically feather a path after creating it.