[HN Gopher] Shasta: AI-powered audio recording and editing
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Shasta: AI-powered audio recording and editing
Author : nonoesp
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-09-23 19:25 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pages.adobe.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pages.adobe.com)
| owlbynight wrote:
| Signed up for early access. We currently use Zencastr for
| recording our podcast, which has been great, but curious how
| Shasta will stack up and it'd be nice to not have to pay for two
| subscriptions.
| jannyfer wrote:
| This "Mic Check AI" - I actually just want to try this one
| feature.
|
| I never know what gain I should set on my XLR mic + USB audio
| interface and I also don't know how Teams/Webex will do to my
| signal. Is it compressing my signal? Noise gating it? No idea!
| samdotdesign wrote:
| You can try it now at https://shasta.adobe.com/miccheck
| capableweb wrote:
| You don't need AI, the one you have in your brain is enough,
| you just need to teach it what to look for :)
|
| There is bunch of introduction material about "gain staging"
| online, here's just one to get you started:
| https://www.audiotechnology.com/tutorials/microphones-levels...
| thomasqbrady wrote:
| Is it still called "Sherlock-ing" if Apple isn't the one doing
| it?
|
| Adobe XD : Sketch :: Shasta : Descript
| (https://www.descript.com), right down to the advertising style
| DocJade wrote:
| The audio denoising / filtering they have seems quite impressive,
| if only I could use it in real-time on teams calls
| muttantt wrote:
| Well, there goes Andrew Mason's startup Descript...
| preommr wrote:
| inb4 Adobe continues their streak of demonstrating they're
| incapable of building software and spends another couple of
| billion to buy out the competition.
| luckydata wrote:
| it's not like it's a particularly out there idea, anything
| logical will have competition. I welcome that a large company
| with resources builds to market useful tools that I can
| expect to exist beyond the next round of funding.
| adroitboss wrote:
| Descript was the first thing I thought of. Since it does audio
| and video, I am not sure this can be called a competitor.
| Descript has such a head start with features I don't think
| Adobe will be able to catch up.
|
| I wonder if they made Descript an offer before starting this
| project. Although, the base problem of editing audio or video
| with text isn't that difficult. They probably thought it could
| easily be cloned. The devil is in the details however, and the
| rabbit hole runs deep.
| samdotdesign wrote:
| Hi! I'm Sam, lead designer of Shasta. You can check out the app
| at https://shasta.adobe.com (OP's post links to one of our launch
| announcement pages). Our enhance speech and mic check features
| are already available for everyone to try.
| sullivanmatt wrote:
| You have a very neat website (https://sam.design). Learned
| something new today.
| samdotdesign wrote:
| Oh hey thanks!
| _visgean wrote:
| Is the plan for this to be only an editor for podcasts or is
| there a plan to also serve the podcast through this platform?
| (i for example almost never listen to podcasts but would
| sometimes just enjoy reading transcripts...)
| samdotdesign wrote:
| We've been focusing on Shasta as a place to record and edit
| all kinds of spoken audio, including podcasts. As far as
| hosting and platform stuff, still figuring that out. But
| yeah, transcripts are great!
| _HMCB_ wrote:
| Thank you for stopping by and the link. I signed up for access
| using the OP's link. Is that no longer required?
| samdotdesign wrote:
| Sorry for the confusion! Applying for access is still
| required to access Shasta, our recording + editing app. We've
| been slowly ramping up in getting people access to it...
| working hard on making sure it's a super smooth experience.
|
| Buuuut in the meantime, we launched two of our AI features as
| standalone mini apps that anyone can use for free, and those
| are called Mic Check and Enhance Speech. They're fun, try
| them out and let me know what you think.
| inasmuch wrote:
| I know everyone hates Adobe (I certainly share some of the
| grievances about their pricing structure) but I have been using
| Photoshop for something like 23 years, working across half that
| many creative disciplines, and cannot overstate how much I value
| the consistency, reliability, and neutron-star density of its
| feature set. You call it bloated, I call it a Swiss army knife. I
| don't want every tool to be that way, but I love that some are.
| (The problem with this analogy is that Photoshop actually /is/
| the best tool for many of the things it can do, where the Swiss
| army knife is solidly in jack-of-all-trades territory.)
|
| Given this, I am very concerned about Adobe's continued march
| into web apps. For most of my UI and web design work, I use
| Figma, and quite like its feature set, but that I cannot use it
| offline and that I cannot work in a file that requires over 2GB
| of RAM due to its browser RAM cap is infuriating to me when
| Photoshop (the supposedly worse program) enables me to manually
| allocate as much of my system's 64GB of RAM as I please. It's
| difficult to imagine any web app stably and efficiently growing
| to Swiss army knife-levels of capability. Not just in terms of
| performance and resource management, but also GUI, keyboard
| shortcuts, etc.
|
| I've long assumed my CC subscription would die with me, unlike
| many (most?) of my peers, but if the web-based Photoshop somehow
| became the primary Photoshop, I may have to cancel my
| subscription, and then kill myself.
| Keyframe wrote:
| For all shit we give Adobe we have to give them credit. Over
| time their tools become incredibly good for productivity (even
| though they might suck hard in certain departments like
| performance). I've been around for long enough to see few of
| these. Freehand for example - there were tears and cries for
| help when they got ahold of it. Illustrator was shit at the
| time; Today it's awesome and an industry standard. Flash, same
| story. After Effects, same story. Premiere, same story.
| Indesign, same story. Etc.. Hard reason why most of those
| became industry standard was/is that Adobe understands how to
| cater to the user of those. Performance sucks, yes. Stability?
| Sometimes as well. User experience? The best. It's like with
| Microsoft and dev tools.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Performance sucks, yes. Stability? Sometimes as well. User
| experience? The best
|
| Not sure how this makes sense. If the performance is not
| good, and the stability is lacking, then the user experience
| cannot be the best. I rather use a video editor that makes me
| go through two menus instead of one, rather than having a
| video editor that crashes on me or takes ages to generate the
| proxy clips (or even need proxy clips for 4K and below
| footage).
| quasarsunnix wrote:
| The problem is the bloat. I have CC access via work, but still
| choose to go with Affinity because of the performance issues. I
| counted 20 processes running the last time I had PS installed.
| The apps all take forever to load, drain battery if working
| remotely, and are far more unstable than in the past. I too
| grew up in PS in the 90s, but let's not pretend it's not become
| a dumpster fire - albeit a very feature rich dumpster fire as
| you stated.
|
| I agree that Figma shares many of these same issues performance
| wise. Truthfully the only creative software I use that I truly
| enjoy these days is Blender. Hopefully one day the passion of
| Blender will make it to other areas in the creative software
| space.
| inasmuch wrote:
| I haven't used any of the Affinity apps. But are we talking
| about the same Photoshop?
|
| > I counted 20 processes running the last time I had PS
| installed
|
| I don't check how many background processes are running when
| I use Photoshop because I don't notice them at all. Almost
| every feature I use in it feels responsive, especially
| compared to how it used to be. If you're talking about
| telemetry, yeah, I hate that too, but I've more or less
| resigned to it as a necessary evil in all my professional
| tooling.
|
| > The apps all take forever to load
|
| Photoshop opens nearly instantly on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, as
| it did on my M1. It was slower on Intel, but what wasn't. I
| can open and close Photoshop three times before Discord even
| loads an empty window.
|
| > drain battery if working remotely
|
| I've never tried a remote workflow with Photoshop, so can't
| speak to that at all. Definitely does not seem like what the
| program is optimized for, and I would think battery drain
| would be the fault of whatever tool you're using to remote
| in, no? Or do you mean just working on an unplugged laptop?
| In which case, I find Electron apps that do one task poorly
| tend to be less efficient than even heavier desktop apps that
| 100 things well, Adobe or otherwise.
|
| > and are far more unstable than in the past.
|
| Sorry, what? I haven't had an Adobe app crash on me in
| probably eight years. I of course count that as good luck,
| but to say the current builds are less stable than older
| versions is just ... insane to me. Thinking back to, say, the
| CS2/3 days, half my time in the program was spent Cmd+S-ing
| for fear of the inevitable hourly crash and loss of work.
| Photoshop crashes were a legitimate part of creative culture
| from like 1999 to 2012.
|
| Sorry if I sound like an Adobe shill. We've just clearly had
| very different experiences with their products of late.
|
| Where we are in agreement is that Blender is cool! I'm too
| much of a neophyte in 3D workflows to assess whether I think
| it's ultimately well designed (some bits seem to be ...
| others not so much?), but it seems to run very well on the
| various machines I've tried it on and I have a great deal of
| respect for the nature of the program and the people behind
| it.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Adobe keep adding pointless new features which I have to keep
| turning off in the preferences.
|
| The new save dialog is insane. No, I don't want to save a
| copy just because I want to save a jpeg. Why is this even a
| question?
|
| I have no idea why it isn't possible to copy/paste text with
| its blending options. Select All, Copy - Nope. All you get is
| the text, with none of the effects. (I know you can duplicate
| a layer - but not to a different document.)
|
| Why does Creative Cloud install three versions? I suppose
| it's nice that I have v21, v22 and v23 but - why?
|
| There still isn't a simple "paste clipboard to new document"
| command - something Paintshop Pro had back in the 90s.
|
| Does anyone at Adobe actually use PS professionally? These
| are all simple usability issues that could be fixed with a
| bit of thought. But instead we get Neural Filters - useless -
| and the occasional core behaviour that changes for no good
| reason.
| tehlike wrote:
| Online/offline thing can be fixed with progressive web apps at
| least on Android. Figma has to implement it though.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| For offline alternative to Figma check Lunacy. It's quite
| powerful, multiplatform and free. UI and workflow is well
| thought out.
|
| It seems it's written in C# as it uses Avalonia UI.
|
| https://icons8.com/lunacy
| dietrichepp wrote:
| I've been using Photoshop alternatives for a long time now, but
| when I was a kid, I had access to Photoshop (version 2.5 and
| later 5.0). I'm used to the alternatives. Mostly Gimp, Krita,
| Pixelmator, and Procreate.
|
| Recently I had a chance to use Photoshop 7 on an old iMac G4
| that I acquired. Surely this would be like living in the dark
| ages, banging some rocks together?
|
| Well, no. It turns out that this old version of Photoshop is
| easy to use and powerful. I can quickly do simple graphic
| design tasks that would take me longer in other programs or
| leave me frustrated. I can also do a bunch of simple photo
| editing tasks that I've been missing out on. This experience
| really highlighted how I've gotten used to missing features or
| poorly-designed UIs in programs like Gimp. Simple things like
| messing with channels, changing the brush size, working with
| 16-bit color and alternative color spaces, layer styles, nice
| text layers--it's all just there and working and ready to use,
| in this nearly 20-year-old software.
| some-guy wrote:
| I use the Windows version of Photoshop 7.0 still. It works
| out of the box with WINE as well on MacOS and Linux.
| folkhack wrote:
| Adobe CS5 user here - 12 year old software.
|
| CS5 Master Suite w/discs and valid serial from a reputable
| seller on eBay still commands $200-300+ which is nuts to me.
| But, when I realize that I can do all of my modern graphics
| workflow in this 12 year old software I get it.
|
| I would love to use some of the newer parts of the suite but
| the functionality of my CS5 still 100% covers my use-case.
| For photography I've ended up on Darktable, and if I need to
| manually retouch a photo there's nothing stopping me from a
| Darktable <> Photoshop CS5 workflow.
|
| As much as I want to love Gimp - I can't. It is outright
| ineffective and lacks features compared to even my 12 year
| old Photoshop. The people who continue to tout it as a 1:1
| replacement have never worked in a professional graphics
| workflow.
|
| Also, Procreate is amazing for doing illustrations though - I
| _really_ wish I had it when I was learning digital painting!
|
| ---
|
| Regardless, just wandering sharing anecdotes because I relate
| to your experiences. Hard agree that legacy versions of
| Photoshop (and honestly the entire suite) are still insanely
| powerful. I also find them to be _way_ more stable than their
| newer counterparts. They 're just objectively a better
| financial decision - I bought this a decade ago and I don't
| have a monthly $50-60 Adobe draw on my bank account.
| milchek wrote:
| I still have a CS5 (or 5.5/6) master suite license
| somewhere from i was able to purchase it under
| 'educational' discount back in the day, but I figured it
| won't work on newer machines and OS.
|
| Are you using yours on an older machine?
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Just chiming in to appreciate CS5.
|
| PS CS5 is one of the best pieces of software ever released.
|
| It is honestly miles better than any modern PS clone. It's
| kinda sad how no open source alternative has even come
| close.
|
| Every other alternative is a compromise in some way or
| another.
| nonoesp wrote:
| I discovered today that Adobe is introducing Project Shasta, a
| web-based AI-powered audio recording and editing tool. You can
| request access now [1].
|
| It seems their intention is not only to provide AI-based audio
| editing and recording but also to cover the ground of what
| Riverside already offers.
|
| Remote recording - Recording with others is as easy as sharing a
| link. Everyone's audio is recorded in high quality locally, then
| Project Shasta syncs it back together in the cloud automatically.
|
| "Soon to come features" list things we can already find in
| Descript, such as filler word removal or speech enhancement. And
| features already available in the beta include microphone
| checking for optimal quality and microphone distance, AI-powered
| audio, remote recording with guests, and project templates.
|
| I was waiting to see what Adobe's take on AI-based audio editing
| and recording was, and it seems it's here. At the moment the
| project is referred to as Shasta; I imagine these capabilities
| either format a new product offering or are integrated with
| existing tools like Audition, Premiere, or After Effects.
|
| What do you think?
|
| [1] https://pages.adobe.com/shasta/request-invite
| mrandish wrote:
| As an old-school video editor who learned editing on analog
| VTRs (tape machines) and progressed to digital non-linear
| editing, I think the time saving potential of AI-assisted audio
| editing is substantial.
|
| I still think it will be a while before AI is ready to create
| more than a first draft edit but if it handles 95% of the easy
| cases that's still a huge time-saving - especially on long-form
| projects. I spent so, so many hours of soul-sucking, rote
| drudgery doing things like manual audio ducking back in the
| day.
| dilap wrote:
| Hopefully something like this catches on w/ smaller
| podcasters. Listening to shit-quality compressed internet
| audio in a podcast interviewing someone really interesting is
| just such a shame!
| adzm wrote:
| Really excited to see the transcription based editing. There is a
| ton of work that this can simplify. I really hope some of this
| gets integrated into Audition or AE etc as well.
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(page generated 2022-09-23 23:00 UTC)