Adobe has been burning the development oil lately. After garnering attention with its Photoshop Lightroom beta, last week it released a public beta of Adobe Soundbooth, an apparent competitor to Apple's Soundtrack Pro that is "focused on creative professionals without audio expertise, or those who prefer an application focused on making short work of the most common tasks they handle every day. The tools in Soundbooth remove the mystery from editing while preserving superb sound quality."

Due to licensing issues, the application doesn't yet support MP3, MPEG-2, H.264, and FLV formats. Interestingly, Soundbooth works only on Intel-based Macs (and on PCs running Windows XP). The beta, a 59 MB download, expires in February 2007, and Adobe says that the final release version will appear sometime in mid-2007.