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Adobe Audition is powerful, cross-platform audio editing software in a category of its own. It has specialized tools for cleaning up and restoring audio. It offers precise, nondestructive editing for corporate and commercial video, as well as podcasts. It’s stellar in post-production, unlike Audacity, which is a much simpler program. In a pinch, Audition also functions as a digital audio workstation (DAW), though it’s too limited and expensive for that market given its lack of music composition tools. From topping off your audio clips and getting them to sit just right in a final video project or podcast to crafting sound effects for video games and ducking music to spotlight voiceovers, Audition excels. Overall, however, our Editors’ Choice winners are Apple Logic Pro and Avid Pro Tools. How Much Does Adobe Audition Cost?Audition began its life as a program called Cool Edit by Syntrillium Software. I remember it from its multitrack-enabled Cool Edit Pro days. Adobe bought the product from Syntrillium in 2003, relaunched it soon after as Audition, and has developed it ever since.As with other Adobe software, you “buy” Audition by subscribing to one of the company’s Creative Cloud (CC) plans. Unfortunately, prices have gone up since our last test. Audition costs a rather high $22.99 per month on an annual plan, $34.99 on a month-to-month plan, or $263.88 on a prepaid annual plan. It is also available as part of a package with all of Adobe’s professional products, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and more, for $59.99 per month as part of an annual plan or $89.99 monthly. However, students and teachers can get a full Adobe CC subscription for as little as $19.99 per month. When you stop paying, Audition stops working, and you keep nothing.Whether any of these plans make sense to you depends on your needs. Suppose you’re the type of audio engineer who buys a program once and uses it professionally until it’s no longer supported years later. In that case, Audition will prove a much more expensive proposition than Logic Pro (a flat $199.99 forever, with free upgrades). But if you upgrade your audio workstation often, paying hundreds of dollars upfront and then $99 or $149 every couple of years to get new versions, Audition makes more sense. Its best value proposition is if you’re already working in Adobe Premiere Pro and pay for a full CC subscription anyway, in which case Audition is part of the package. Still, to put all this in perspective, three years of working with Audition will cost you at least $791 prepaid, possibly more if you choose a different plan or go month-to-month. That’s a lot.
(Credit: Adobe)
To install Audition, you need a multicore PC running Windows 10 64-bit or Windows 11 or a Mac running macOS 11 (Big Sur) or newer. The biggest recent news is that Audition now runs natively on Apple M1 chips, which takes an already-fast digital audio workstation to another level. (A few less commonly used features, such as support for EUCON control surfaces, burning CDs, and several video codecs, are still yet to be supported at the time of this writing.) For this review, I tested Audition 24.0 on an Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (Late 2021, M1 Pro) with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD running macOS Sonoma 14.2.1, with a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 USB interface attached and a pair of PreSonus Eris E8 XT studio monitors. There’s no hardware copy protection dongle required with Audition as there is with Pro Tools. You need to run the Creative Cloud desktop app in the background, which you install as part of the setup process. By default, Audition CC collects usage data, and to stop it, you have to manually opt out after the program is installed.Audio Editing and Restoration With AuditionAudition offers two modes: the Waveform view for stereo editing and the Multitrack view for mixing tracks on a timeline. It’s simple to flip between these two whenever you want. In the Waveform view, recording audio and adjusting volume is simple, and an attractive spectral frequency editor lets you attack the recorded wave in different ways. You can punch a recording from a specific point within a clip and quickly zoom in to the same range on multiple selected clips.The Multitrack view is where Audition looks like a typical digital audio workstation. Here, you drop audio clips on different tracks, such as a voiceover on top of music stems or ambient sounds, or mix recorded interview segments together to create a podcast. As expected, the interface is entirely drag-and-drop compatible, and you can cut or trim clips for seamless, nondestructive edits. That’s unlike the Waveform editor, where edits are destructive.
(Credit: Adobe)
New to Audition 2024 are Clip and Session Markers, which help you position, arrange, and synchronize clips and attach comments in the multitrack view (above), not just when viewing a waveform. You can add markers anywhere with the M modifier key and view all of them with the Markers button in the toolbar on top. Audition now lets you choose a custom speed for your audio using the existing JKL Shuttle Speed controls (normally just back, stop, or forward). The four speed defaults are 0.1x, 0.5x, 1x, and 2x, and you can set custom speeds (such as 1.1x) using L key. The Loudness Meter lets you analyze full mixes, single tracks, or any bus or submix in real time. It includes presets for common regional broadcast requirements as well as streaming services such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Netflix. This is one of the trickiest aspects of producing audio these days, as every service seems to have a different idea of a target LUFS level (and the nature of LUFS is such that it’s not a fixed target to begin with). It will save you trips to loudnesspenalty.com or similar benchmark tests.
(Credit: Adobe)
Audition can Strip Silence from inactive regions in recorded clips without losing sync in multitrack audio—perfect for fast cleanup of interviews, podcasts, and other multitrack recordings. Strip Silence includes adjustable parameters to compensate for background noise or uneven volume levels among participants. Other nice features: DeReverb is a valuable tool that lets you reduce or remove reverberation in an existing audio file. It can handle big, spacious reverbs or short delays (echoes). DeNoise removes hiss and hum from existing files, but more transparently and certainly easier than the older Noise Reduction feature. Instead of requiring you first to create a noise print from a quiet period of the audio or fine-tune the exact frequencies and dB levels to get an acceptable result, DeNoise does it in real time with no latency. You just have to control how much noise reduction you want. It also lets you preview the noise print it’s removing on its own as a reality check. The Sound Remover tool is another winner; you can get transparent results using it to remove an errant bump, paper shuffling, or even a car alarm from an otherwise perfect take. The auto-ducking works with ambient sounds; you can manually enter time and parameter values for keyframes. The Mixer view looks a little cluttered, mainly thanks to overly thin sliders, but Audition’s metering and support for console effects are plenty strong. It’s easy to strip multiple audio channels from MXF and other types of video files using the Multitrack view. For example, suppose you record a scene for film or television using multiple microphones (or even in 5.1). In that case, the program lets you store each recorded file in its own channel in the file and then configure the routing of the source channels to each corresponding clip channel. Adobe has also built in an Essential Sound panel targeted at beginners. To use it, select a clip and then choose a Mix Type, such as Dialogue. The program then shows you only a few crucial adjustments that are probably the most important for that task, like repairing a click or making it sound clearer. The program includes more than 50 audio effects in total. One of Audition’s most powerful features is its Favorites, which lets you set up macros that perform a series of common operations on wave after wave, such as normalizing or converting to stereo. In tandem with Favorites is Batch Processing, which lets you perform tricks like matching up an entire group of clips to broadcast regulation standards or analyzing the frequency and even phase of recordings—this would have saved me a ton of time on some older video game sound design projects I worked on years ago. The program makes it easy to export broadcast-ready audio in various formats to comply with loudness standards in film, television, commercials, and radio worldwide. With the 2024 update, you can finally copy and paste effects from one track to another in multitrack and waveform modes. Adobe has also made a bevy of bug fixes in recent months, including improved stability for VST3 plug-ins and reduced latency for sub-mixed tracks. Overall, Audition is also the ideal step up from Audacity or GarageBand when recording podcasts.
(Credit: Adobe)
Can I Use Audition to Record Audio and Remix Music?Adobe has tightened up its marketing around live multitrack recording and no longer pitches Auditon in this fashion, but it’s worth noting Audition’s features and limitations here. First, the good stuff. The audio rendering engine is powerful enough; it can handle up to 128 tracks or record 32 tracks simultaneously without stuttering. You can also select, adjust, and delete multiple tracks simultaneously. Audition comes bundled with several thousand royalty-free loops and over 10,000 sound effects to get you started with post-production. Audition also offers a music Remix tool that attempts to automate cutting new versions of a song without sending it to an actual remixer or mix engineer for changes. It lets you adjust a song’s target duration to get exactly the right cut. Say you shorten the song by 30 seconds; the Remix tool will go in and adjust the song segments and transition them in a way that resembles splicing tape, and that’s pretty much seamless to the listener, assuming it’s not a song most people recognize. You can customize splices by telling it to favor shorter segments with longer transitions or vice versa. More importantly, the program can be configured to favor rhythm (timbre) elements so that the beat always stays locked when necessary or favor harmonic structure when it’s a group of vocalists or stringed instruments playing that don’t have an easily discernable beat attached.I find the Remix tool great for library tracks you’re not super particular about or custom music composed for a specific project. But having worked on the other side of this as a composer for years, I’d still say just ask the composer for their opinion and possibly an extra cut of the song at a different length, if it’s possible within the parameters of your contract with them.
(Credit: Adobe)
Despite Audition’s high cost, it’s not a full-featured digital audio workstation. If you’re coming from Avid’s Pro Tools or another DAW, Adobe doesn’t include any software instrument libraries with Audition. There’s no score editor or internal MIDI support. This isn’t part of Audition’s intended mission, but for its price, the omissions are harder to forgive, given its other scoring and post-production facilities. Audition can help cut and produce a score for video, and you can drop in loops in a pinch, but aside from the aforementioned Remix tool, it assumes the music is already done.That said, if you’ve already got Audition for other reasons and want to use it to record a band, you certainly can. You can even pitch-correct vocals and master the track with the included multi-band compressor and limiter. But you’d be better served by our Editors’ Choices Apple Logic Pro or Pro Tools. And there are always third-party add-ons like Izotope Rx for restoring audio in another DAW, should you need similar tools to what Audition offers for other kinds of projects.A Focused Audio EditorIf you’re a video editor looking for a complementary product to beef up the audio in your projects, or especially if you work with (and are already paying for) other top-level Adobe software like Premiere, Audition is a natural fit. Its comprehensive audio restoration and polishing tools are excellent, and Audition easily sends audio back and forth with Premiere. Our 3.5-star rating of Adobe Audition is a split decision. It’s a 4-star product for those working in post-production or who already have an Adobe subscription for more of the company’s products, and a 3-star utility for others who find it too expensive and narrowly focused. Our Editors’ Choice winners remain Apple Logic Pro for Mac and Avid Pro Tools for Windows.
Pros
Strong audio-restoration, sound-removal, and noise-reduction tools
Loudness Meter is a boon for targeting streaming services
Can finally cut and paste effects between mixer channels
Useful visualization tools
Adheres to film and television broadcast standards for audio
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Cons
Only available via an expensive monthly subscription
Lacks MIDI and virtual instrument support
Limited scoring facilities
The Bottom Line
Adobe Audition is a comprehensive audio editor for video post-production, podcasts, and audio restoration, but it’s expensive for what you get.
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