Adobe Soundbooth

» see adobe.com/products/soundbooth as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed soundbooth. by '07 when adobe shipped it inside creative suite 3, the audio editor i actually opened on a windows machine was something else entirely. soundbooth's specific tier, sitting between the windows freeware and adobe audition, was not a tier i operated in. it was meant for premiere editors who needed to clean a voice-over without leaving the adobe sandbox, and that was not my use case.

adobe bought syntrillium's cool edit pro in 2003 and renamed it adobe audition. for the first four years after that adobe shipped audition as a windows-only standalone product for audio engineers. soundbooth was the second product adobe built on top of the cool edit codebase, aimed at the creative suite buyer who edited video or built flash content and occasionally needed to fix audio. it was cross-platform on windows and mac. it had task-based presets instead of audition's mixer-heavy interface. the 'send to soundbooth' button inside premiere is the integration that mattered.

soundbooth shipped in three creative suite cycles between CS3 in '07 and CS5 in '10. each version added a small piece. none of them ever caught up to what audition could do for an audio professional, which was the design choice from the start.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the actual end ~

adobe ported audition to mac in '11 and rebuilt the codebase. audition CS5.5 shipped on 11 april '11, cross-platform for the first time. with that release there was no remaining reason for soundbooth to exist as a separate product. the lower-end editor had been the cross-platform option, and now audition itself was cross-platform.

adobe announced sales would end on 24 april '11, two weeks after the audition CS5.5 launch. existing soundbooth installs kept running on whatever machine they were already on. updates stopped. creative suite buyers who had been using soundbooth got pointed at audition.

~ the long tail ~

soundbooth files used the.sbsn extension. audition can import them but the format is essentially a frozen snapshot of the 2010 product. a workflow built around 'send to soundbooth' inside premiere kept working for as long as the customer kept their CS5 install alive. by the creative cloud era in '13 the integration was gone, replaced by 'send to audition'.

in adobe's history of audio products soundbooth sits in the same slot as imageready in the photoshop history. a product built to fill a tier that the flagship had not yet reached. when the flagship caught up, the tier-filler was retired. clean exit, predictable lifecycle.

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