Make Serious Waves with This Stable Audi Staple

I’ve worked in recording studios, and as a broadcast engineer. As a kid
I even remember editing sound with a razor blade. Audition 1.5 has
power beyond anything I could have imagined only a few years ago. It is
also more stable than this version number suggests. Based on
Syntrillium’s mature Cool Edit Pro, it’s had years to mature. Adobe
engineers sprinkled their magic on it, coming up with a powerful,
well-designed and well-integrated addition to their suite of
professional media tools. It bonds with Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 like
super glue.
In fact, Audition 1.5 is all about compatible connectivity, with Midi
and ReWire hosting also built in. If you’re not convinced, let me just
say that Audition 1.5 was used in preparing soundtracks, for among
others: Aviator, The Incredibles, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow; not to mention, From Dust to Glory, the first feature film edited entirely in HD using Premiere Pro and After Effects (see Studio/monthly, February).
The Work Areas
Adobe Audition is divided into three logical main work areas, each with
well-designed tool interfaces. Each area can be customized to your work
style by rearranging windows and creating custom buttons. This is handy
for setting up duel 21-inch monitors, which I highly recommend for
serious film work. These setups can be saved for use in different tasks
or for use by different people.
Multitrack View
Multitrack reminds me of how I used to work in the old Premiere laying
different clips in vertically and synching them up by sliding them
horizontally until they sound right. But multitrack is so much more
accurate. Plus, you can record/mix up to128 virtual tracks
simultaneously.
Loops
Loopology is all the rage. It’s about building professional music
compositions using pre-recorded music loops. Adobe provides a massive
DVD library of over 5000 excellent loops. The work area will
automatically adjust your loops for tempo and key, then you assemble
them in different tracks where they automatically align, snapping
properly into place for a perfect composition.
I like taking unrelated pieces, like clips from Pachelbel’s Canon in D
and using them in a jazz or industrial composition. The results are
surprising but wonderful.
Video Sound Tracks
Assembling sophisticated soundtracks, including multilingual DVD
tracks, is a breeze. You load video into the top editing track, set
markers and synch up your sound clips.
For small projects I use SmartSound’s SonicFire Pro with Audition Pro.
It’s a standalone soundtrack designer with tons of custom music and
sound FX disks available in its library. I create a custom sound clip
in SonicFire Pro and output it as a stereo.wav file, which I import
into my multitrack Audition production. I’ve been assembling my sound
FX library for years. By pulling in different SFX to emphasize video
beats and sonic moments I easily add depth to the track. I can add DSP
FX here, too. I double click a clip, automatically switching back to
the edit work area; apply pitch adjust and reverb, changing a hammer
sound into a unique bell; then click the "Multi" icon and I’m back in
multitrack to continue assembling.
Sweetening the Pot: Edit View
I love the intuitive edit/recording interface. A wealth of cool tools
will give you new confidence. Many of them have smart automatic modes
that work fast and well. For example old radio shows often have hum,
scratch clicks and hiss associated with them. There are tools for auto
de-humming, De-click/popping and even a sophisticated de-noising tool
that builds a noise profile, and then systematically removes just the
noise. Selecting the sample to work on is a breeze. You zoom down to a
single sample or out to an hour’s track and you have a choice of useful
tools. This is where I record individual tracks.
You’ll find the usual time/amplitude displays that we’re used to
editing, but we’re all going to have to accept new, better ways. For
example, the exclusive Spectral View interface with its frequency/space
editing approach. It offers a new world of meticulous sound sculpting.
I can easily see and select problem areas and apply manual or smart
tools to repair or sweeten a clip with an incredibly delicate touch.
Easily grab that transient where someone bumped the mike, and excise it
with great precision, leaving the music untouched.
Audition is wonderful for vocal performance repair, too. For example if
your singer misses a note or two, fear not. Adjust that single note to
a perfect D manually, or you can adjust the entire performance
automatically.
More Fun Stuff
It’s all fun, but there’s the cool DSP or Digital Signal Processing, I
mentioned. There are tons of them, built-in and plug-in.In 1996,
Steinberg (Cubase) introduced Virtual Studio Technology (VST,) a cross
platform DSP/MIDI plug-in standard and Audition 1.5 has it. Tons of VST
modules are available free on the Web, many are weird, but some
are indispensable. Caution: most MIDI VST modules won’t function in
Audition. Start experimenting with VST and you’ll see sun rise with
bleary eyes.
Then there’s the 5.1 surround sound editing interface. Pure fun. You
can set up sound fields for Dolby Digital or DTS formats, or output to
interleaved six channel wave files for games.
To output 5.1 for DVD you’ll need special encoding software. I
recommend Minnetonka’s SurCode like the demo embedded in Premiere Pro.
Their Dolby Digital 5.1 standalone encoder is $999.00 while their DTS
encoder sells for a mere $499.00. But you can activate the embeded
Premiere Pro Dolby 5.1 encoder for only about $300.00.
Publishing your Tracks: CD Project View
This is the less exciting, but oh, so useful part of Audition. Here we
flow smoothly towards the finish line. Set up your burns in this well
designed CD-Mastering work area by dragging files, and arranging them
the way you like. Type track information and burn. Audition converts
each track to standard 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo, with no fuss, and sends
it to the CD or DVD drive.
I like to burn old radio shows to audio CDs for car trips. I keep more
than 35,000 of them on DVDs in MP3 format. I just drag from my source
DVD, arrange and burn.
Conclusion
If you work with sound Audition 1.5 is going to blow you away, save you
time and open new windows on sound design. It gives you innovative,
easy to use tools for radio/music/film production in all areas:
recording, repairing, mixing, mastering and music creation. Forgive me
for gushing, but this tool deserves it.
SMART ADVICE
  • Many of the tools in Audition have smart automatic modes that remove scratch and hum from archival clips.
  • Mastering CDs is a snap: Audition converts each track to a standard 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo clip.