Soundbooth Saves the Day, At Least a Few Minutes of My Day

Posted At : October 19, 2007 10:54 PM | Posted By : Leif Wells
Related Categories: Adobe, Soundbooth

So, here's the scene: I am working on a big "proof of concept" for one of the many clients at Roundbox Global that puts together some animations with some audio — you know, old school multimedia — and I needed to break up a large .wav file into many separate .wav files. Ah, it's like the old days all over again. Do you know how long it's been since someone actually asked me to do that?

Mind you, back in the old days when people said I needed to break up some audio files, I'd scoot next to my PowerMac 9500, fire up Macromedia SoundEdit Pro and start cutting and pasting. Today, I honestly had to think about what I'd use to do this kind of work. Since I was sitting at a brand new Windows Vista machine that had no sound editing software on it that I could find, I decided to download a trial copy of Adobe® Soundbooth™ CS3 to see if it was up to the task. Mind you, the only things I had seen Soundbooth do was the cool squeaking door demo where the presenter healed an unwanted squeaky noise out of the file. That was back at MAX 2006 in Las Vegas (baby) and I had not messed with Soundbooth since then because I haven't had the need.

Downloaded, installed and fired up the trial version of Soundbooth and opened a file. Now what?

So, I selected a section of the file I needed to make into a new file. Uh, I don't see what to do next, and I am not that dumb.

Finally, after seconds of indecision (gasp), I right-moused the selected area of the sound and found "Save as Separate File..." in the context menu. Wonderful! I was able to take a single file and break it into over thirty files in less than 30 minutes (counting the phone call and dog-oriented interruptions).

The next time I am inside Soundbooth — mind you, I have several thousands of files to create when this project goes into production — I am going to search for some batching functionality like I remember from the SoundEdit Pro days. Maybe I can cut thirty minutes down to thirty seconds?