Soundbooth's royalty-free scores can appear (and can be edited) as a simple clip for the beginner, or can be set to reveal the elements that make up a score. Take the score titled, "Ocean," for example. After I preview it in the Scores pane and click the Add Score to Multitrack button, a clip is created and overall intensity and volume can be keyframed right on the clip. If I click on the clip's Parameters drop-down menu, I can add "heavy surf" or "people" to show up on the clip, so I can edit the intensity of each one separately. If I don't want to do keyframe programming, I can select "Basic Editing" from that same drop-down menu and the keyframing lanes disappear leaving overall settings for each parameter that can be quickly changed. Basic parameters also come up on the Properties panel automatically when you select a score clip. The mixing of the various elements is achieved by combining the overall Intensity setting with the Modifier settings (which effects the intensity of a given element in a way that is based on the overall intensity setting, so the parameter is viewed as a percentage) available for the individual elements. In the case of the "Ocean" score, I set the overall intensity, then balanced out the Heavy Surf and People modifiers with a few remaining background sounds (seagulls in this case) that didn't have their own modifier setting. Pretty easy.
One of the hottest new features of Sb CS4 is that it can now handle multitrack projects. The original SbCS3 would only let you work on a single mono or stereo file at a time. We whined, Adobe listened... thank you! Now Sb CS4 users can put together the entire sonic picture and save it all into a single file called an Adobe Sound Document, or .ASND (pronounced "A-sound"). This leads me to another great feature (if you use other Adobe production software, especially the Production Premium package) -- integration! An ASND file can be used in applications like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Flash and can be brought up for editing in Sb CS4's multitrack environment simply by using the “Edit In Soundbooth” command, giving you the option to non-destructively edit the original file or render and edit a new audio file.
Many different types of scores are available, including over 3,000 SFX for a wide variety of settings and 100 musical scores of various genres. The library is growing steadily and Adobe makes it easy for you to take advantage of this by providing a panel for you to preview and download scores from within the application. The panel is called Resource Central and also contains product announcements, tips, and other helpful information. Currenlty, many of the sound effects are free to download and 50 of the 100 scores are free, as well. (The other 50 are sold in bundles of five based on genre and use.)
Another new feature that promises to be very interesting is the Speech Transcription tool. This analyzes a clip of recorded speech, transcribes it to text, saves it in the file as searchable metadata. This means that you can search for words contained within the recording, which has pretty amazing implications if you think about it. I worked with a couple of prime examples which worked pretty well. These were well-recorded interviews of people with good diction, etc. I also tried some decently-recorded location audio from a film shoot and the results were less than stellar. Granted, it was a death scene in a bedroom and the actors were talking in a whispery tone to the dying child, but I thought at least something would come through correctly. This is the first installment of an emerging technology, and I'm sure it will get better as it develops. In a future release I'd love to see Adobe develop a toolset that uses the metadata generated from the transcription of production dialog recordings in a cuing system for doing ADR!
