When Adobe removed Audition from its CS3 editing suite, the official reason was that the application was overkill for the occasional video-oriented user.

It's replacement was Soundbooth CS3, which still included useful tools such as noise removal. But, although it was a worthy workhorse, it lacked important features that were previously available through Audition.

With CS4, Soundbooth is in its second incarnation, and where Audition has gone upmarket to become more of a digital audio workstation tool, Soundbooth is taking on some of the features it’s left behind.

In particular, Soundbooth now supports multiple tracks of audio and video, making it a more useful tool for matching audio from different sources. To go with these new multitrack projects, a new Adobe Sound Document (ASND) file format has been created.

This format can be imported into Premiere Pro CS4, After Effects CS4, and Flash CS4 Professional. With the help of round-trip editing, you can now do the sound mixing within Soundbooth, rather than having to switch to it to treat each track, then back to the main host app for the mix.

In a similar vein, the Edit in Soundbooth command has been extended to audio tracks in After Effects CS4 and Flash CS4 Professional, as well as Premiere Pro.

And Dynamic Link can also be used to import After Effects compositions and Premiere Pro sequences into Soundbooth. This makes Soundbooth a more powerful tool than before.

And the Dynamic Link ability, which neatly sidesteps the need to render out a rough edit to mix music against, means it outstrips Audition for soundtrack creation, too.

Creating a musical background within Soundbooth has been enhanced by the multitrack facility, allowing you to mix between different musical themes across your soundtrack.

And additional Soundbooth Scores can be downloaded from Resource Central. This provides online access to royalty-free assets, including scores and sound effects, although there weren’t any scores listed when we looked.

Core improvements

A number of core features have been added to make tight mixing easier, and chief among these are volume keyframes, which function in exactly the same way as the volume (and opacity) rubber bands that have been part of Premiere’s arsenal for a decade or more.

Clicking on the volume line using the Move tool adds a keyframe, and dragging on it alters the volume. This can be performed both in multitrack and clip-editing views.

Volume Correction is an entirely new tool. This is similar to normalisation, except that it can also work across multiple files. Simply drag the files you want to have a uniform volume into the list. Then press the Match Volume button and their levels will be unified.

Alternatively, the Equalize Volume tab works like traditional normalisation, keeping the volume at the same level across a single file.

Loop creation has been greatly enhanced by automatic beat detection. With a single audio file open, you can toggle the Beats view to see the rhythm as spectral lines. This makes the selection of in and out points for a loop far more precise.

And one of the more intriguing new features is the Speech Search, which is also available in Premiere Pro CS4. This transcribes speech to text and stores it in XML form, which is then directly associated with the audio file. Highlight a portion of the audio waveform and the associated text will be highlighted to match. Conversely, click on a word in the speech transcript and the corresponding wave peaks will be selected.

It’s an intriguing technology, and potentially very useful when handling large amounts of dialogue. But we found the US English language recognition library provided with our review copy rather inaccurate with our Australian English test dialogue. Fortunately, you can correct the text by editing it.

There are sundry other workflow tweaks, which make the interface look less sparse than its predecessor. The MP3 compression preview when you save into this format is just one of the welcome smaller touches.

And it all goes together to make this second outing for Soundbooth feel more rounded than its predecessor.

It’s still very much targeted at working with other Adobe software, and a few holes in its toolset remain – there’s no option to reverse audio and play it backwards, for example.

But the multitrack ability, volume-related tools and greater interoperability via Dynamic Link are all useful improvements, and go together to make it well worth the upgrade from CS3.