Adobe keeps churning out apps and betas; the latest is a new lightweight audio editor called Soundbooth. I’ve done a detailed look at the beta for Create Digital Music, but here’s why visualists should be excited. First, of course, Adobe is building the app to try to court the Photoshop and Flash crowd to audio editing, for people who are intimidated by Adobe Audition or simply find it overkill for what they’re doing. (Honestly, it’s overkill for some musicians, too.) For that function, it fits the bill, and is worth keeping around even if you just want to speed up the process of normalizing and adding fades to audio. The second reason, though, is that even in this early beta, Adobe is building new integration with Flash. You can place markers in a recording (even as you record, if you’re recording into Soundbooth), then export the marker list via XML to Flash. That means you can cue animations to sound; hopefully in future you’ll also be able to cue sounds to animation and access this functionality via ActionScript, minus the use of the Flash app. I’d love to use this for interactive design work I’m doing that involves sound. Adobe has promised more of this kind of integration in the future, so I expect the upcoming revision of Creative Suite will give us more of this kind of stuff. In the meantime, if you work with sound at all, Soundbooth could be a useful download on Mac and PC:
Adobe Soundbooth beta [Adobe Labs]
Adobe Soundbooth Beta First Look: Simplified Audio Editor for Quick Sound Editing (Windows, Mac) [Create Digital Music]