Soundbooth Rocks!

I’ve been playing with Adobe Soundbooth this weekend, and I’m honestly pretty impressed. I had actually checked out a couple of early betas and while the plans for it sounded great, most of the cool features were not there, or barely implemented. Then the other day I got a full version in the mail and I have to say, it is pretty awesome. I think I fit right into one of the key demographics for this product. I work with Flash and sometimes need to add sound to projects, and don’t know jack about music or audio. I mean, I can create a Sound object and do just about anything with it, but I couldn’t compose a song, and most of the features of pro audio software baffle me.

The two features of Soundbooth that really make it worth purchasing, IMHO, are AutoComposer, and the Sound Effects Library.

AutoComposer lets you… well… compose a song. You start out with a score, which is a basic set of tracks put together in a professional manner. You can load a score and just export it as a professionally sounding song just like that. But, the power comes in that you can start tweaking the way this song sounds. You have a few different sliders for things like “intensity”, “melody”, “synth”, etc. depending on the score. Messing with these changes the character of the song quite a bit. There are also a few presets for each score to get you started. Then you have options to add an intro, outro, fade out, loop, etc. You can choose a preset time, or set your own custom time. You can even go really crazy and start keyframing various effects and really customize the resulting song. If you download the trial, you get a couple of scores, but when you get the full version, you start off with something like 40+ scores in a bunch of different genres. You can also buy additional scores on line. Now, these aren’t the kind of songs that you are going to put on your iPod and listen to during your commute. They are designed for backgrounds to videos, presentations, games, etc. I’m curious if the score format is open enough to allow people to make their own third party scores that they can distribute.

The other feature I love is the sound effects library. This isn’t actually distributed with the program, but the program has an interface to the on-line library, where you can download thousands of high quality effects. It seems I’m always searching for decent sound effects on line. I’ve always wound up at Flashkit, which has a lot of decent effects, but you have to sift through a whole lot of crappy ones to find them. The ones in Soundbooth all seem pretty good quality and are named and categorized really well, so it’s easy to find what you want. Preview them right in the UI and download with a click of a button. As far as I can tell, you don’t have to pay anything extra for any of these. Access to the library is included in the program. The fact that they didn’t just include it with the install means either that it is HUGE, or they will be adding to and updating the library as time goes on.

In addition, there are tons of sound manipulation features, filters, visual healing, integration of sound with video, etc., etc. Stuff I haven’t really even touched. I’m just mentioning the two things that I was excited about when I first heard of Soundbooth, and have proven to be as cool as they first sounded.