Audition CS5.5

When the public beta of Audition 4.0 for Mac came out I downloaded it straight away and blogged about my first impressions. Since then I've enjoyed having a version of Audition on my MacBook, and now that the final release has come I've taken advantage of a generous education discount and bought the full version.

I was surprised to see the new version of Audition included in the CS suite, because I thought Soundbooth would stay there and Audition would be on it's own branch. However it does make much more sense to bring Audition in with the other pro apps. Soundbooth has been discontinued, so there's no budget audio editor from Adobe: it's Audition or nothing.

There's not a massive amount more to say. I haven't given it a full work out yet, so can't tell you too much about the functionality. Visually the final release is very similar to the beta; a History palette has been added to the bottom left of the screen, and you can search for help in the top right corner.




There are a couple of other things I've noticed that are different to Audition 3.0, and probably were in the beta too. In the multitrack view you used to be able to drag a clip out of the files panel and move it across to the right hand end of the timeline prompting everything to move left and allowing you to find the end of the previous clip. This was really neat for quickly putting together radio packages and doesn't work in the new version. I also liked the "Autoplay" tick box in the open/import audio file dialogue box that allowed you to preview files by clicking on them which was handy if you had a large directory full of sfx or other files to browse through.*

In the beta there was no "Generate" menu which in 3.0 allowed you to create tones and noise. This is still missing, as is the ability to group clips in the multitrack view.

For a full list of what hasn't made it through from previous versions into Audition CS5.5, or what's been renamed have a look at this page on the Adobe website.

Over the next few days and weeks I'll explore the package further. If you've questions, or things you want trying out (mainly from a broadcast production point of view, I'm not planning on recording an album) then leave a comment and I'll do what I can to help.

*I've just remembered that in OS X you can use Quicklook to get a preview of files in dialogue boxes by clicking on the icon, which is almost as good as Autoplay. How you can replicate that in Windows is another matter.

Audition for Mac: vertical zoom in multi-track view

Audition Track Headers
Originally uploaded by westy48

When I blogged last month about my first impressions of Audition for Mac I wasn't able to make it zoom vertically in the multi-track view. I accidentally discovered that this is actually quite easy. All you have to do is scroll up or down while hovering your mouse over the track headers and you'll be zooming in and out to your heart's content.

Surf's Up

All those years ago when I was training to be a Studio Manager I remember someone - probably Paul Hedges - saying how useful white noise could be for creating sound effects: waterfalls, seawash, jet engines and generally whooshy stuff like that.

I filed that piece of information away but never had the need to try it out. But now some of my students are working on an assignment where they'll need a sea wash sound effect, and this seemed like a great chance to have a go. Of course I'd need to work out how to do this before letting them loose. Here's what I did, using Adobe Audition v3.0

1: Start in the Edit view. Make a new stereo file, set sampling rate to 48kHz, channels to Stereo and bit depth to 16

2: In the Generate menu select “Noise”

Set Color to "White", Style to "Independent Channels", Intensity to around 30 and Duration to 20 seconds




3: Switch to the Spectral View and using the marquee tool select everything above 17kHz.

Press “Delete” on the keyboard to remove these high frequency sounds. This will just take away some of the fizziness.

4: Return to the waveform display and go to the effects menu. Choose Stereo Imagery and then Doppler Shifter



















5: In the presets choose Large Track. Set the radius to 250 and click OK. You've just made your first wave. These can be strung together to create the sound of the sea licking up on the shore as you enjoy a celebratory beverage.

And here's the sort of thing you'll end up with. It's not the finished article, but isn't a bad place for the students to start from and tweak a bit.

Adobe Audition for Mac OS X - first impressions

Side by side
Originally uploaded by westy48

When I bought my first Mac in November 2002 I had no trouble getting software to do what I wanted, except for editing audio.

There are plenty of sound editing programs for Mac, Bias Peak, Logic, Pro-Tools, Soundtrack, eventually even Garageband. But none did what I wanted. What I wanted was for them to be Audition. After a brief dalliance with Sadie, I was brought up editing on Cool Edit, Cool Edit Pro and eventually Audition; editing everything from straight voice reports to docu-dramas and Christmas carol concerts. Nothing else felt quite the same. I even mixed some radio packages in Final Cut Express, because it was the best tool I had at the time.

But now Adobe have released the Beta version of Audition for OS X. It's free to download from here, and will run until the first full release comes on sale. System requirements are a multi-core Intel processor, OS 10.5.7 or later, and at least 1 GB of RAM. (Although you may be able to squeeze it onto lesser systems).

This is Beta software, and not a reflection on what will finally ship. There are a few features that I like in Audition 3.0 for Windows which are missing, but Adobe may add these before releasing it for sale so I'm not too worried. Indeed, as this isn't the final version of the software I'm going to talk about what I like and a few obvious changes rather than worry about minor omissions and glitches.

If you've downloaded the beta you're likely to want to get some files into it so you can play. Audition for Mac doesn't support .ses files for multitrack sessions from the Windows program, but in 3.0 you can save sessions a .xml files which the Mac version will open nicely. I see this as a signpost from Adobe that the days of the .ses file are numbered, and in future versions of Audition for Windows I expect we'll see support for it drop too. If you haven't already, start using .xml for your multitrack sessions. It's the future. Audition's .pk files are also a bit different, being saved as .pkf files on the Mac. This isn't a big issue, but I imagine it's another peek into what might happen with future versions of Audition in Windows.

When you switch to Spectral frequency display in the Waveform view there's a small version of the wave shown at the top of the window.

This is a nice touch, and makes it a lot easier to locate the section of audio you want to work in amongst the mush of bright colours. Now that I'm teaching I find that I use this view more and more with students, and wish I'd investigated it more when I was actually working in the industry.

Back in the Multi-track view projects with video files work as expected, except that the 16:9 video in my session was displayed at the wrong aspect ratio so everyone looked tall and thin. In the Windows version this is played back properly so I'm sure it'll be fixed by the time Audition for Mac is on sale. For people using Audition as part of a video production workflow there's something new that'll make them feel right at home. Non-linear video editors tend to let you use the J, K and L keys to control playback. L plays forwards, K is stop and J plays backwards. If you press L twice the playback speed increases. It's a nice way to scrub through content and it now works in Audition too, in both the Mutlitrack and Waveform views. Adobe have also thought about Mac laptop users. In Multitrack you no-longer have to right-click and drag to move a clip, it's just click and drag. Strangely this feels perfectly normal, even though it's against years of learnt behaviour.

Clips in the multitrack view now have a title bar which shows whether you're editing the volume or pan envelope, which should help my students, and as the volume envelope has been moved down from the very top of the clip you can now use it to boost the level of sections of the clip.

Briefly, a couple of things I haven't been able to do: there seems to be no vertical zoom in the multitrack view and I can't find out how to generate tones or white noise.

So far I think this is a great release of what's already an iconic piece of software (Iconic? is that a bit OTT?). If you use Audition, but are never going to put your hands on a Mac I think it's important for you too, because if Audition is going to be truly multi-platform with files being platform-agnostic, then Audition for Windows is going to learn a lot of these new tricks too.