Adobe Introduces SoundBooth Beta, x86 Only

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif

Adobe has introduced a competitor to Apple's SoundTrack Pro dubbed SoundBooth.

Try Adobe® Soundbooth™. Soundbooth is a brand new application built in the spirit of Sound Edit 16 and Cool Edit that provides the tools video editors, designers, and others who do not specialize in audio need to accomplish their everyday work such as:

-Editing audio quickly.
-Cleaning up noisy audio.
-Visually identifying and removing unwanted sounds.
-Recording and polishing voiceovers.
-Adding effects and filters.
-Easily creating customized music—without musical expertise.

Similar to Adobe's LightRoom application, SoundBooth is beginning its life as a public beta. Adobe is offering the software in Windows and Intel-Mac versions, and Adobe specifically mentions that they will not be offering a PowerPC version of the software.

Apple is quickly moving its focus towards Intel Macs, and no longer sells Power PC systems in many places. By focusing on Apple's future, we have been able to bring this powerful application to the Mac platform much more rapidly, and with a stronger feature set.

Adobe's Intel Mac FAQ still lists many of its popular programs (such as Creative Suite) as being ported to be Universal applications in their next revisions.

SoundBooth should be available in mid-2007. Pricing is to be determined.

[ Digg This ]

[~Shard~]

Interesting, I didn't hear anything about this in the rumor mill. I'm not sure how it will fare, but competition is always a good thing...

[miniConvert]

No PowerPC version? Ouch. Lets hope that's not a growing trend for all you golden oldies out there

Sounds pretty cool though I think.

[platypus63]

Wow, I expected PPC support to drop in a few years, not a few months. Sucks for anyone with the Quad G5s. Sucks for me with my dual G5.

I hope this won't be a common trend.

[bishopduke]

I used Cool Edit a lot in college to do radio drops etc. I loved it. It was really just a wav editor. Then Adobe bought it, and I haven't used it since. Although It seems they kept true to the heart of the software. I still prefer what is now called Adobe Audition over Soundtrack. Although, they really are pretty different.

[GekkePrutser]

I'm sure this is the first of many companies to ignore the massive PowerPC userbase out there. I wish there was something like a reverse-rosetta.

So much for the age-old tradition of Macs having a much longer useful service life than a Windows PC, now a 2-month old PowerMac is already becoming obsolete.

[~Shard~]

Originally Posted by miniConvert

No PowerPC version? Ouch. Lets hope that's not a growing trend for all you golden oldies out there

Yeah, I knew this was inevitable. (I'm running a 1.25 GHz G4 iMac.) That being said, for the applications I use (and this won't be one of them), I honestly don't see myself being forced to buy an Intel machine for a loooong time. Just because Adobe has decided to rpoceed in this manner doesn't mean other companies will follow suit. And you can bet that Apple definitely won't, at least not for a few more years. Heck, Classic was supported until what, last year essentially? And the G3 machines up until Leopard?

[longofest]

Originally Posted by platypus63

Sucks for anyone with the Quad G5s.

Yeah, tell me about it (looks down at my Quad). But honestly, I think it will suck even more for Adobe, as they are really limiting themselves in the market that they can reach. Come on Adobe, it wouldn't be THAT hard to code according to Apple's Universal standards, would it?

Then again, they may be trying to go for the optimal performance possible. I blogged about this a while ago, and how Universal Binaries using the Accelerate framework may not always give you all the performance options available to a program.

[~Shard~]

Originally Posted by GekkePrutser

I'm sure this is the first of many companies to ignore the massive PowerPC userbase out there. I wish there was something like a reverse-rosetta.

So much for the age-old tradition of Macs having a much longer useful service life than a Windows PC, now a 2-month old PowerMac is already becoming obsolete.

I wouldn't worry too much just yet. As I said above, just because Adobe has decided to proceed in this manner does not mean everyone else will too. I'm betting that PPC machines will still be "safe" for a few more years in this respect. And plus, for many "non-Pro" users like myself, I don't need to run the latest version of certain software, so even if the newest versions are Intel only, this won't affect me much. My Office v.X will still run fine, just as my Photoshop Elements 3, iLife 06 and Toast 7 will. They meet my needs so I don't feel a need to upgrade them at this point in time even if new versions come out (UB or not).

[Doctor Q]

Adobe's other apps are to be Universal, but we see that they are willing to abandon PowerPC, as will other vendors who don't see much of a market in software for the old Macs, and who can save development costs by selling Intel-only applications.

[~Shard~]

Originally Posted by longofest

Yeah, tell me about it (looks down at my Quad). But honestly, I think it will suck even more for Adobe, as they are really limiting themselves in the market that they can reach. Come on Adobe, it wouldn't be THAT hard to code according to Apple's Universal standards, would it?

If the CS3 situation is any example, then Adobe would have you believe the answer to that question is "YES".

And yes, there still is a very large PPC user base out there which Adobe will risks alienating with this type of a decision. If they can make CS3 UB, and that's not coming out until spring of 2007, how come they can't make SoundBooth (a relatively simpler app compared to CS3) UB as well, which will be released presumably only a few months afterwards?

[GekkePrutser]

Originally Posted by ~Shard~

I wouldn't worry too much just yet. As I said above, just because Adobe has decided to proceed in this manner does not mean everyone else will too. I'm betting that PPC machines will still be "safe" for a few more years in this respect. And plus, for many "non-Pro" users like myself, I don't need to run the latest version of certain software, so even if the newest versions are Intel only, this won't affect me much. My Office v.X will still run fine, just as my Photoshop Elements 3, iLife 06 and Toast 7 will. They meet my needs so I don't feel a need to upgrade them at this point in time even if new versions come out (UB or not).

Yeah, I think software that is already on the market for PPC may even see another new release (relatively not a lot of work), but I wouldn't count on much newly developed stuff (such as SoundBooth) to be released for PPC. Unless it's being developed in XCode but for some reasons most large software companies don't use it.

I still think the current PPC line will be obsolete a lot quicker than we are used to At work we still use a G3 from 1999 for testing apps. Works great running 10.4.8. I don't think our PPC's will last 8 years I agree that Apple will support us for a good while but I think 3rd parties will drop off a lot quicker.

But you're right, we don't need the latest software per-se to have a use for our Macs... Didn't really think of that.

[ZildjianKX]

I can understand why they are doing this. This is a new product and there is no preexisting PPC version out there. It almost seems like a waste of development time since a good portion of the customer base who would be purchasing this will have an Intel mac by mid-2007.

Still sucks for the quad G5 mac owners. Now I'm just waiting for the first Intel-only mac game to come out, lol.

[~Shard~]

Originally Posted by Doctor Q

Adobe's other apps are to be Universal, but we see that they are willing to abandon PowerPC, as will other vendors who don't see much of a market in software for the old Macs, and who can save development costs by selling Intel-only applications.

Yeah, at the end of the day it always comes down to money, doesn't it?

[speakster]

Considering that this is in Beta and probably will be for a year, I don't think their risking losing sales to PPC people since its not for sale right now....by that time, a lot more people will be running Intel Macs. Perfect time to sell a nice polished product.

[combatcolin]

You can almost hear the cries of relief of all those people who put off buying a G5 and waited for Intel.

Years of support for the PPC my left arse cheek!

[fabsgwu]

This is a very bad prescient. The universal binaries are there for a reason, Adobe is not a good Mac developer imo for this reason.

On the other hand, the design professionals won't upgrade to Intel Macs until all of their apps are ported. Once that happens there will be a lot more incentive to switch to Intel, and in the end it will be good for Apple to really solidify the base of Intel-Mac users. I guess this is ripping the band-aid off quick and clean, but it's really not fair to a lot of users.

[JDOG_]

Hah, Adobe being committed to x86 Macs. If they meant it we would have had a universal binary update to Creative Suite 2 a lonnng time ago.

[twoodcc]

i'm pretty disappointed that it's not universal

[Westside guy]

I really hope I'm wrong, but this is pretty much what I was afraid of - vendors dropping PPC support quite soon after the Intel transition was complete. I know Apple will stick with universal binaries for the forseeable future; but there are no guarantees with any other vendors.

Of course I can see the other side of this. Writing universal apps is not just a matter of "checking a box" in XCode; despite what I've heard some non-coders say on the subject.

Let's hope this really is a one-off, and Adobe just did this because it's a new app that wouldn't gain a foothold with the existing PPC crowd. But given their history (or at least the history of their public comments), I wouldn't bank on it.

[Bear]

Originally Posted by Macrumors

Adobe is offering the software in Windows and Intel-Mac versions, and Adobe specifically mentions that they will not be offering a PowerPC version of the software.

I guess this is a piece of software I qwon't look at for a few years. Then again there are other universal apps that do pretty much the same thing. And of course why switch programs once you have something that does what you want?

If the CS3 version of Photoshop is Intel only I guess it's another version I won't upgrade to. (I'm still running Photoshop CS.) Adobe is being rather stupid.

My Power Mac still has at least a couple of years of life left in it. All it needs is another couple of gigs of ram.

[-Jeff]

I think this is a special case. This appears to be a "lite" version of Adobe Audition, which Adobe bought from Syntrillium Software (Syntrillium called it Cool Edit Pro).

Cool Edit Pro was built from the ground up for the Intel architecture. At that time, Intel Macs didn't exist. Since there was no pre-existing PPC compatible version, they have decided not to create one.

Don't worry too much. New Mac applications and updates for applications that already have PPC versions will probably be released as Universal Binaries for years to come.

[drlunanerd]

Hmm, this could work in Apple's favour if, for example, the unthinkable happened and CS3 was released as Intel-only. It'd force a lot of pro users to upgrade their hardware to Intel Macs. Then again it could piss them all off into gradually abandoning the Mac platform and switching to PC.

It's not a good precedent, but inevitable at some point. Surprising that it's happening already though.

[caveman_uk]

Originally Posted by Westside guy

Of course I can see the other side of this. Writing universal apps is not just a matter of "checking a box" in XCode; despite what I've heard some non-coders say on the subject.

You're absolutely right but as a dev I'd say Adobe is throwing away a large chunk of the Mac market as many users will still have PowerPC machines even when this app comes out. Maybe, Adobe is not after the Mac market at all here. They're really interested in the Windows market but the port to x86 mac was pretty easy.

[iris_failsafe]

Actually they are concerned that their mac share is growing and they were not ready for it. Within their creative apps macs are over 50% and growing.
Here is the article
http://software.seekingalpha.com/article/12183