Adobe yesterday released a free sound editing software called Adobe Soundbooth Public Beta for Intel-based Macs and Windows that has all the basic ingredients you need for recording a professional sounding podcast or voiceovers for your Powerpoint presentations or Sceencasts.

If you have worked with other Adobe video/audio apps like Premiere, After Effects or Audition, you will feel very comfortable with the new Soundbooth interface - it has the same gray theme with a panel based layout. [see screenshot]


The USP of Soundbooth is that you can accomplish the three most common audio clean-up tasks with the click of a button - i.e., remove the background noises, rumbling sounds or the clicks & pops. Advanced users may try the Lasso tool to selectively remove audio that matches certain frequencies by making marquee selections around the waveforms.

Also present are the standard audio enhancing features like Fades, Normalize and Trimming. With Adobe Soundbooth, you can extract audio from video clips [like avi, wmv], enhance their sound quality inside Soundbooth and later export them to a variety of audio formats.

Unfortunately, the first public beta version available at the Adobe Labs is buggy and did crash a couple of times on our Windows XP SP2 machine. There's no support for common audio/video formats like MP3, FLV or H.264 though Adobe says that support will be available in the future releases.

Adobe is targeting non-techies and casual users who do not feel comfortable inside sophisticated applications like Cool Edit or Adobe Audion.

Overall, it will be an interesting application to watch in the coming months when they fix the initial bugs and add support for more codecs. While Audacity is still the audio software of choice for most newbie podcasters, Soundbooth could be a good alternative though the retail version may not be available for free.

Visit the Soundbooth Page or just Download Soundbooth.