What Does Adobe's Premium Audio Product Bring to OS X?

Adobe closed one of the final gaps in its range of creative products for the Mac today with the release of Adobe Audition for the Mac as a public beta. You can read more about it in the company’s official press release, or you can jump right in by downloading the software. We shot a few quick questions via email to Ellen Wixted, Adobe’s senior product manager for digital video and audio, to get a little more info on what Audition can do for you.
StudioDaily: Adobe users on the Mac already have a sound tool in CS5 – Soundbooth. What types of users are targeted by Audition?

Ellen Wixted: Soundbooth is tailored to the needs of creative professionals who work with audio but who are not audio experts. Audition offers more robust professional capabilities for working with audio.

SD: Is Audition for the Mac a 64-bit application?

EW: No, it will not be in this release.

SD: Audition is a standalone product. Does it integrate with the rest of the CS5 applications?

EW: One of Adobe’s priorities is building robust workflows that address the real-world challenges our customers face as they create content. Integration between products is a key part of how we develop and deliver those solutions, and Audition for the Mac offers many of the same integration options available between Audition 3 for Windows and Adobe Premiere Pro.

SD: Will Audition for the Mac have complete feature parity with the current Windows version?

EW: Audition for Mac offers many of the core capabilities you’ll find in Audition 3, but because it is based on new underlying technology it does not have an identical feature set. Some features, such as MIDI support, are not included because other tools in the market offer those capabilities and they are not part of the core audio post-production workflows that are at the heart of Audition’s strengths. Others, like CD burning, are not included because the majority of newly-created content is distributed digitally and inexpensive or free third-party CD burning tools, such as iTunes, are readily available.