Adobe Audition In The Studio:

My Favorite Tricks for Audio Mixing, Editing and Restoration

By Eddie Ciletti

I've been using Audition (as Cool Edit Pro) for almost five years, to compile, convert, edit, import, mix and restore audio in all forms, from mono to multitrack to surround. To demonstrate ways Audition has streamlined my work, I thought I’d share some examples of recent projects that show off my favorite features in Audition.

Open Sesame

If you haven’t had your hands on this application, first let’s get comfortable with the interface shown below. Audition opens in Multitrack View, displaying Tools across the top, a File Explorer to the left and the Mixer in the center, with space for audio tracks to the right. Further down, from left to right you’ll find the Transport controls, track zoom, a large counter plus an assortment of Time Locator windows. An awesome metering window takes up most of the bottom portion of the screen, with the remaining area taken up with a metronome. These windows are "docked" as one and can be user-customized; here, the Help menu is useful and context sensitive.

Creating a new session (from the file menu, tool bar or the local Explorer window) opens the sample rate window. Other settings are accessed from the Options menu. Once imported, audio files appear in the local Explorer window and are dragged to any of 128 track locations. Audition supports virtually any audio sound card, plays MIDI and video by simply dragging files into the Multitrack view, just like audio files.

Figure 1: A "standard" multi-track music session

Taking Audition to the Limit

Of the many hats I wear in the studio, one is as an audio consultant and sonic diagnostician. People send me sound files to evaluate microphones and mic techniques, room acoustics and rough mixes. Although Audition supports up to 128 tracks, I've never gone past twenty-four; the degree to which you must choose between real-time and off-line processing depends on factors such as your sample rate, the number and length of tracks and how much you tap into the effects arsenal.

Audition’s many built-in plug-ins, include dynamics processors (compression, limiting, gating and expansion), EQ and reverb, can be used either in real time or offline. If a session is processor-intensive, Audition will advise you to commit some processes or try a "lite" version of a Reverb algorithm, for example. For the longest time I had been running Cool Edit Pro on a Pentium II processor (don't laugh, it worked!), and took advantage of my Soundscape Mixtreme card’s onboard DSP. (More on this coming up.) When Adobe Audition was released, I took the opportunity to load it on a new Pentium 4: Now there's enough power for video, but I still commit as much processing as possible just because it keeps things simple and reduces processor overhead. If a process doesn't work out it can be undone. If you're commitment-shy, name the original file "flat" and work with a copy.

Format Fluency

Format conversion may not be the most obvious “must-have” feature in a DAW, but Audition has nearly two dozen options, ranging from Amiga, Apple and PC to Sun formats—including an option-rich MP3 encoder. I performed a surprisingly successful test with the Fostex DV-40, a DVD-RAM recorder that embeds four channels of high-resolution audio into one file. Audition extracted the four separate files without any help from me. (Dontcha hate it when computers ask for your help with something only "they" can know?) I've also used it to open Digidesign Pro Tools files.

Audition can take advantage of any Windows supported sound device, on-board, internal/PCI, exterternal firewire / USB. I use everything from the most plain vanilla on-the-momma-board sound chips to the more esoteric Soundscape Mixtreme. I often take advantage of Mixtreme's various features, especially its onboard DSP and in this case, the ability to route individual channels from Audition to a surround monitoring system. The four tracks provided by the Fostex DV-40 were routed to stereo front and rear; the latter augmented with a little reverb from Mixtreme's Reverb plug-in. Once satisfied with the surround balance, Four new tracks were created within Audition for export to Minnetonka's STEEL DVD-A authoring program.

Forensics and Voice Intelligibility

I was handed a very challenging spoken word project on CD that required extensive clean up. It was an audio-only recording that had been edited on videotape equipment—a project that would have been perfectly suited for Audition. There were several adult and two teenage voices, all of different quality, some close and some distant. After importing the stereo mix into Audition, each voice was edited onto its own track for individual processing.

Figure 2: Multitrack view detailing stereo audio reassigned to individual tracks. Note that tracks support both mono and stereo audio files.

It soon became obvious that level and equalization alone would not be enough, so I took advantage of Audition's remarkably effective built-in Noise Reduction plug-in. (Some plug-in algorithms cost as much or more than Audition alone!) I was able to remove background noises and hiss, including "thumps" from feet bumping table legs.

Once I fixed the various discrepancies, I created a new mix that would become the CD master. A cassette transfer test revealed sibilance problems, which were resolved using dynamics processing (a high-frequency limiter) and equalization, to reduce the high frequency content to safe levels for cassette duplication. Everyone was happy with the results.

Video: The Final Frontier

I shot my first educational video last year and am in the process of editing the good stuff. For my project, in addition to the camera audio there are also multichannel voice and music tracks. Working with multitrack audio from within a video editor is awkward, though I am anxious to see how Audition will be integrated into Premiere. While writing this article, I discovered that the only thing "normal" about Audition is the constant surprise of something else cool that it does, such as the ability to play video files within the multitrack window.

Figure 4: Video integrated with multi-channel audio to assist the mixdown process.

Is Audition Still Cool?

When Cool Edit Pro became Adobe Audition, original users wondered if it would still be cool— it is! The original feature set remains, and new additions round out the Adobe Audition package. Premiere users now get access to a simple-yet-powerful digital audio workstation (Yeah!) while the "Adobe Connection" significantly raised the visibility of this already successful product. I can't wait to show you my video in progress, next time ‘round.

Eddie Ciletti wears many hats and can be seen eating oversized strawberries at www.tangible-technology.com

Want more information? Visit www.adobe.com/products/audition/main.html for product specs, downloads, training and other support.