[John Welsh]

KC, you’re right-on about Soundbooth. It’s weak sauce. I’ve put two other posts in the Cow to try to “stir it up” a little, since what Adobe did, in arrogant Microsoft fashion, is FORCE me use SB in CS3. In other words, they denied me the ability to configure PP CS3 so that I could right-click on an audio track and see an “Edit in Audition” option that would allow me to “round-trip” edit audio tracks.

Adobe says they replaced Audition with SB in CS3 based on user feedback. And lots of users DO like SB. That’s fine! But why FORCE us Audition veterans to use SB? That’s why I think Adobe is in danger of becoming the Microsoft of creative software… they are presuming to know what’s best for me, trying to think for me, instead of giving me the freedom to decide what works best for me. It really grinds my lights out when companies arrogantly do this. How hard is it to program it like CS2 so you DO have the “edit in Audition” option????

ADOBE, ARE YOU LISTENING???

[John Welsh]

Jim, feeling your pain. Been using Audition for ages and love its processing power and capabilities. Great software. Rarely use it for its multi-track capabilities–mostly for repairing/tweaking/cleaning audio tracks. Very good in these tasks.

Soundbooth is a neutered dog by comparison. Adobe says they made this switch based on user feedback, but WHY did they deny us Audition users the option to stay with Audition for round-trip editing? I’m afraid Adobe has become the arrogant Microsoft of creative software by NOT giving us users the ability to decides how to make our software work for us.

If there IS a way to use Audition instead of SB for “round-trip” editing of audio tracks in Premier Pro CS3, I couldn’t find the answer in CS3 Help, Adobe’s forums, on the Cow, or anywhere else.

[One post said they did this because Audition isn’t cross-platform… but they STILL could give us the “Edit in Audition” option when we right-click on an audio track, as in CS2—how hard is that to program? Give me a break, Adobe’s a $$gazillion company!]

Soundbooth also doesn’t come close to fully taking advantage of available processing power, at least in real-world comparisons I’ve done. VERY frustrating when waiting for processes to complete for long audio tracks. (i.e., Audition 2.0 on a dual core Pentium machine completes most processes demonstrably faster than Soundbooth on a QUAD core machine! And on my quad-core Q6600 machine, SB rarely passes 9-10% processing power for many key tasks!!!).

To their credit, Adobe fixed lots of stability problems with PP CS3 (not nearly as many crashes as with CS2), although it’s clearly not as stable as Vegas Pro 8. But on this count, they really blew it.

ADOBE: HELP US OUT HERE! GIVE US A PATCH AND GIVE US FREEDOM TO USE YOUR SOFTWARE SUITE THE WAY IT WORKS BEST FOR US!!!

[John Welsh]

Here’s the reality: Audition is worlds better at processing and tweaking audio files than is SB. The catch is, that when Adobe came out with CS3 and decided to include the watered down editor SB, they chose to blow off all the users who are experienced in Audition and prefer it. Hold on Cow, don’t censor me. Here’s the proof: In CS3 there’s NO WAY to tweak user preferences so that you can “round-trip” process audio tracks in Audition (or at least, none I can find in the software, or in the Adobe or Creative Cow forums!).

I’m afraid Adobe’s become the arrogant Microsoft of creative software by presuming to “know” better than I do, how I want my software to work for me. In this context, Adobe forces me to use SB, or do without the “round trip” feature, which is one of the reasons I bought CS2 Production Suite in the first place!!! Many users like SB for its simplicity (plenty of blogs attest to that, and that’s fine if SB works for you) but anyone who’s used Audition for any period of time knows: Soundbooth is a neutered dog. Slower, NOT optimized for the computer’s full processing capability so processing many tasks takes FAR longer than it needs to (trust me, I’ve compared it to Audition).

ADOBE: GIVE ME MY OPTIONS! I OWN AUDITION—LET ME USE IT!!!