Adobe product manager Hart Shafer confirms on his blog that Soundbooth, Adobe’s new audio editor, will ship both as part of Creative Suite 3 and as a standalone product. Apparently I’m not the only one who wanted to see a standalone version:

Soundbooth Beta 2 Article

Given that Audition is already bundled in the Windows video production suites, maybe this means Mac bundle customers and lower-end customers will also see the app as an included product, which would be nice. We’ll know soon enough.

Equally interesting is the reaction Soundbooth is already generating. Apparently me comparing an audio editor to Photoshop pricked up some ears:

Adobe Soundbooth Beta 2: Now Easier, More Photoshop-y [digg]

And, of course, digg’s trolls immediately took to the comments. One good idea out of the discussion: OGG export, which has a lot of appeal to me and wouldn’t even require a license fee for Adobe. Mac users are still understandably upset that there’s no PowerPC version, but given the availability of Sound Studio and Peak LE, and the Intel-specific optimizations in the Intel-native Soundbooth, this argument seems like a waste of time.

Are Graphics Tools Intuitive?

More interesting, though, a lot of readers were upset that I called Photoshop intuitive. Personally, I think the basic lasso editing tool and graphical painting metaphors are quite intuitive, and I think a spectral view is one of the best ways to visualize sound. These metaphors have become so familiar to computer users, in fact, that we forget they weren’t the creation of Adobe Photoshop at all. The lasso tool, and most other paint tools that are now as second-nature to us as windowed interfaces, are the invention of Bill Atkinson, while developing MacPaint for the original Mac (pictured at right, courtesy folklore.org):