Mind Readings: Adobe Podcast Review

In today's episode, we're going to do a bit of a bake off and review. And what we're going to be reviewing today is Adobe Podcast. If you're not familiar, Adobe rolled out this product. It's been in beta for a while. It's called Project Shasta and now is uh in production, and people can try it out.

And I would imagine eventually it will find its way into Adobe Audition or something like that. In a nutshell, it's a pretty cool product. Um what it does is it uses artificial intelligence to clean up sound. And we're going to talk about what kind of AI, because it's not, I think what most people think. But first, let's talk about what we're going to be listening to.

And the audio clips in this episode are going to be audio only. So uh well, a number of them were done in a moving vehicle, safely, obviously we don't uh on a dashboard mount and things. And as a result, there's no video because I was operating the vehicle. Um there'll be audio samples. And the four samples we're going to be looking at are going to be um in a parked car, just on a phone, um, in a moving vehicle on uh with the ventilation system turned up really high, right?

Uh the fans going full blasts, high air conditioning, high heating, etc. Uh, in a moving vehicle with high road noise. Now, this is all done in a Toyota Prius, so it's uh you know a mid-market car, not a luxury car by any means. Uh, you know, some cars have really good sound isolation, the Prius is not one of them. Uh, and finally, in a parked car, wearing a P100 mask, right?

This is not exactly conducive to having conversations, right? Um, it is great for stopping, you know, bad things in the air from getting in your lungs, but not for having conversations. So let's go ahead and listen to each of the samples, and then let's talk about what this software does. This is Adobe Podcast in a parked vehicle. Um, the phone is about a foot away from my mouth.

Uh wanna see how it cleans up this audio, particularly when it sounds a little further away, a little more tinny. This is Adobe Podcast in a parked vehicle. Um, the phone is about a foot away from my mouth. Uh, wanted to see how it cleans up this audio, particularly when it sounds a little further away, a little more tinny. This is Adobe Podcast with high road noise in a moving vehicle on the Voice Memos app.

The phone is about six inches from my mouth. This is Adobe Podcast with high road noise in a moving vehicle on the Voice Memos app. The phone is about six inches from my mouth. This is a test of Adobe Podcast with the Voice Memos app in a moving vehicle with the fans all the way on high. Let's see how this turns out.

The phone is about six inches away from my mouth. This is a test of Adobe Podcast with a voice memos app in a moving vehicle with the fans all the way on high. Let's see how this turns out. The phone is about six inches away from my mouth. This is Adobe Podcast through a P100 mask.

I want to see how the software does dealing with a lot of distortion. The phone is about six inches away from my mouth. This is Adobe Podcast through a P100 mask. I want to see how the software does dealing with a lot of distortion. The phone is about six inches away from my mouth.

Okay. So it's pretty clear that Adobe Podcast does an incredible job with quite frankly, terrible, terrible audio, right? All four audio samples, thankfully, were very short because they were awful to listen to. They're not fun. We did hear some distortion, obviously, because again, you're recording audio in a in an awful scenario.

But what's really interesting is that last sample, the P100 mask, it did a very, very credible job of trying to reconstruct my voice. And that's the important part about the product. It's not just doing leveling tools and the usual things that you do in audio tools. It is, by my best guess, uh, reconstructing my voice. So it has a trained library of known voices, um, presumably in different backgrounds with different types of noise.

It's been trained on it and it's been given the same sample. So I'd imagine when they were building this, they probably did exactly like this, where they had uh a person or people reading a script out loud in a studio quality microphone, and then those same people reading the exact same thing in every imaginable background, same pacing to again teach the model. This is what this voice sounds like, regardless of the background noise. One of the things that people who do a lot of audio editing know is that when you try and do noise reduction, it's really difficult because sometimes the noise is at frequencies at which the human voice operates, right? It's really easy to get rid of like a super high-pitched squeaking, like wiggling in your chair, because that's not part of our voices.

Um it's easy to screen that out by frequency. When a noise is similar sounding to our natural voices, and you try and screen it out, you end up chopping up the voice. And so that last recording with the P100 mask really shows, I think, that it's reconstructing voices into a studio model. So it's more generative artificial intelligence. And that is a great use for that technology.

That is a great use for that type of. And I would say, you know, highly recommend if you are producing audio that is spoken word, like a podcast, for example, that you do use the tool, right? Obviously, the best thing to do is always to record with the best equipment available, right? So if you've got a nice microphone, use it. But if you have maybe um people that you do podcasts with where their equipment isn't as good, or maybe they don't know how to use your equipment as well.

You definitely want to use this tool. And ideally, you want to use it if you can when you're doing these recordings, you want to take the uh individual tracks and run each track through separately so that the model can optimize for one voice at a time. So for example, in the Trust Insights podcast, when Katie and I are recording, we use StreamYard, and StreamYard will send you a separate audio file for each speaker. That's terrific. I can run mine through, I can run Katie's through.

Katie, uh the position because of the nature of her desk, is it her the microphone is never in as good a position as me sitting right on top of my microphone? So we always used to sound different. Now, with this, yes, it adds some production time, but now I can take Katie's audio track, my audio track, put them both through Adobe Podcast, and we both sound like studio quality, like we're in a professional sound booth. So um I strongly recommend using the product. I imagine, like I said, it's probably going to get bundled into something like Adobe Audition at some point or become an another part of Creative Cloud.

If you do audio and spoken word, whatever they choose to charge for it, as long as it's reasonable, it's worth it, right? You know, if they charge like a thousand dollars a month, I'm like, yeah, okay, maybe not. But if it gets bundled in with everything else, like in Creative Cloud, it's worth it. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon.

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