Adobe's John Nack explai lack of C su ort in Soundbooth

Some corners of the Mac web aren't too ha y about Adobe's choice to not su ort the PowerPC chip with their latest beta offering, Soundbooth. We've received a few comments on our original post, and Macintouch has a few posts from readers who are, let's say, 'somewhat u et.' To help bring some se e to the table, Adobe's John Nack (the product manager of Photoshop, mind you) has ste ed in to lay down the company's decision on his blog. Long story short, John explai that su ort i 't being 'removed' from the product - while it's been du ed as 'Audition Elements' by some, it's a brand new baby for both Mac OS X and Windows. In this context, Adobe made the choice of streamlining development (su orting one chi et) which favors focusing on things like features and performance, rather than trying to get a team of audio engineers who are used to working with Intel-based chi to start jugging a second architecture (PowerPC) which Adobe believes A le is treating as "dead to us."

I think this is a really difficult position for Adobe to be in, and given the circumstances, I understand their decision. While the PowerPC architecture is by no mea 'dead' just yet, it's getting up from the di er table and making its way for the coat closet (don't forget, there's plenty of conversation and lingering while putting one's coat on and rounding up all the kids). Readers at Macintouch have cited that a fair portion of the Mac audio industry are still using PowerPC based rigs and probably will for quite some time, and I think that might also have been a significant factor in the decision: Soundbooth i 't competing with Pro Tools and profe ional workflows, it's a mid-range a (at least from what I understand). I am certainly no software engineer, and I know equally little about the intricacies of audio software, but if a company with Adobe's girth says that now is a bad time to start building PowerPC su ort into a brand new product - I'll listen. From the non-developer sidelines, it sounds like it's a lot easier for code ninjas who already had a PowerPC a to unite forces with Intel su ort (thanks in part to A le's UB efforts), as o osed to getting Intel backgrounds (remember: Adobe's audio guys are coming over from Windows development on this one) to shake hands with PowerPC.

In the grander scheme of Adobe matters, however, they haven't shown this "abandoning" attitude in any of their other existing products, such as the entire Creative Suite (in fact Nack reminds us C ha 't gone anywhere in CS3), and even Lightroom Photoshop Lightroom, another recent beta offering for the pro photography crowd, is in fact a Universal Binary. I think Soundbooth was simply caught in the cro fire of this chip architecture migration, and Adobe had to make a hard decision that was ultimately ti ed by looking ahead at the Mac platform, and realizing exactly where Soundbooth is going to sit on the ladder of Mac OS X-based audio editing.