Adobe Audition is the ‘Cadillac’ of digital sound editing for Windows-based PCs. Adobe acquired Syntrillium’s assets back in May of 2003 and re-branded their Cool Edit Pro as Adobe Audition. Syntrillium’s other products were discontinued. As a long time user of CoolEdit 2000 product, I was disturbed when I found out that Adobe had discontinued my Cool Edit 2000 support. However, Adobe has since released an updated version of Audition with a number of excellent new features. Whether you need to record and modify a single audio file, or want the tools to create the next ‘5.1 Surround’ sound smash hit, Adobe Audition has all the capabilities you need. In addition, it has a number of features like built-in CD ripping, non-destructive editing, user defined Notch Filters and multi-channel editing and encoding that can really ease your audio editing workload.

Audition will help you capture your tracks and then, once your source tracks are digitized, it has a really powerful set of audio enhancing tools. You can add reverb, adjust your sound file’s dynamic range to give it more “oomph”, or create a smooth-as-silk fades between the files. Cleaning-up poor-sounding audio by removing any clicks, pops, or any hum, and hiss is just a couple of ‘mouse clicks’. You can stack your tracks on top of one another in multi track mode and arrange them with drag-and-drop ease for group normalizing or other multi-track editing requirements.

I have about 300 open reel tapes that I acquired back in the early Seventies. I have been slowly migrating them to CD using ‘Cool Edit’, so that my wife and I could enjoy these ‘Oldies’ while traveling. Adobe Audition is a major step up and has added dozens of new features that really speed up the migration process. It works equally well on my old 33 1/3 LPs. I can remove the hiss and hum, fix clipped audio, and recover what were previously unusable recordings with the automatic pre-configured Click/Pop Eliminator, the Noise Reduction filter, the Hiss Reduction filter, and the Clip Restoration effect.

I have also added some very natural-sounding reverb to some of my early recordings. It proved exceptionally easy to process some of my sound files for dynamic range to give them more “oomph”. Setting up some very smooth fades proved just as easy as the other editing efforts. Cleaning some poor-sounding tape recordings by removing the clicks, hum, and hiss took a couple of clicks each. I then stacked my cuts on top of one another in the multi track mode, arranged them using drag-and-drop, and performed a ‘Group Normalize’ on them, in order to reduce the dynamic range when I played them on my car stereo. After that, I applied the graphic equalization ‘pre-set’ for the car stereos.

Perhaps, you are creating a ‘Surround Sound’ for your home theater, and then when it comes time to mix your creation, you’ll appreciate Adobe Audition's separate level, pan, mute, solo, and routing controls. If I were a talented musician, I could have played, recorded, mixed, filtered and blended up to 128 separate stereo and monaural tracks using any Windows-compatible sound card. Adobe Audition supports many multiple multi-channel sound cards. As you can see below, I just have an old Sound Blaster Live card, but it still works great for my purposes. Audition is like having a high-priced mixing console inside your PC – without that high of a price! You can save your work in a variety of audio formats from industry-standard .wav, .au, and .aif files, to the more popular compressed formats like .mp3, mp3PRO, and .wma. If you need to work with MIDI or video, then Audition's MIDI and SMPTE support makes synchronization of your digital audio tracks fairly easy. Audition generates MIDI time code, so it can be the master in a mixed audio/MIDI/video environment.

Audition seems to have all of the functions needed to edit and produce a professional sounding audio project from start to finish on a PC. Although, third-party plug-in support is also built-in, so you can use any DirectX-compatible audio plug-in, you probably won’t need any third-party applications or “plug-ins.” Audition has just about everything conceivable designed-in as native filters and/or effects.

Adobe Audition adds dozens of great new features to the Cool Edit product I knew and loved. The latest release, Adobe Audition 1.5, adds even more new features such as ReWire and VST plug-in support, CD burning, frequency space editing, and automatic pitch correction.

SoftwareMedia.com lists Version 1.0 as $499.00 and version 1.5 as $279.95 (Version 1.5 is the best deal!). CompUSA lists version 1.0 for $317.89 but is sold out. Adobe lists the new Audition 1.5 for $299.00. Upgrades from Cool Edit Pro or Audition 1.0 are $69.00. I liked it well enough that I expect to order the $69.00 upgrade!

Minimum Requirements:

Additional requirements for the Multichannel Encoder:

Vendor Information:

Note - For general questions about Adobe desktop products and volume licensing, call 800-833-6687 from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific time, seven days a week.

Reviewer System Specifications:

Desktop Server: AMD Athlon 2400 (2.0 GHz) running Windows XP Pro, 1.25 GB Ram, 120 GB hard drive, 120 GB SATA Raid-0 Array, 64 MB ATI Radeon 7000, Lite-On DVD reader, Lite-On DVD Burner, Sound Blaster Live card, HP PhotoSmart S20 film Scanner, SOHO 100/10 Ethernet, Firewire (IEEE 1394), USB 1.1 and USB 2.0, DirectX 9.0b, LogiTech Trackball, keyboard, etc.

Local Net: US Robotics router, Ethernet and 802.11g w/256 encryption