Adobe Audition

Audition is powerful, versatile, and delivers professional grade quality. It has a variety of features that are native to the program, but also has a vast array of plugins available that only enhance the process. Plus, the ability to dynamically link edited audio assets directly into our video timelines in Premiere is invaluable to our workflow.

The only downside to Audition is the learning curve for interacting with its many many tools. However, if one is at least vaguely familiar with the Adobe family, this will lessen the learning curve some since it is a member of the Adobe Creative Suite Family.

What I like most about Adobe Audition is its genuinely vast library of royalty-free sound effects, which can be easily acquired and dragged/dropped into an audio project. What also helps is that all of these sound effects that are freely available to use are high quality - something very rarely found in such a simple manner. Often free sound effects vary greatly in quality, so it is great to have so many good quality samples ready to go.

There are a couple of issues with Adobe Audition. Firstly, because of the sheer amount of good quality useable samples, it can actually be a problem taking the time to sift through them and find which one is most appropriate - merely a problem of having too many options, which isn't a bad problem to have, but it can slow down the process.

Secondly, Audition is fairly restricted in its usability. For simpler audio projects (such as adding in a few sound effects to a pre-recorded track - perhaps a podcast or vlog) it is perfectly acceptable, but for any kind of composition or detailed audio creation, it appears to be lacking in features that other audio workstations have as standard. Logic Pro would be a superior choice, but it comes with a bigger price tag.

Adobe Audition has been around for a very long time (remember Cool Edit Pro?), and it's come a long way since then. Adobe Audition features a staggering amount of features, and Adobe Creative Cloud users would be remiss in not trying out Adobe Audition as their editor, with its tight integration with Adobe Premiere and Adobe CC products.

The interface may be confusing for some. Adobe Audition opens in the style of a simple audio editor, like Audacity, and it can be hard to find even the simplest of tasks, such as adding plugins or basic edits. Even more confusingly, the multitrack mixing interface is hidden, and I find myself googling every time how to switch to that mode. All in all, a pointlessly confusing interface.

Whether you are looking for a simple audio edit or a complex multitrack session Adobe Audition has it all. I've been using this since it was called Cool Edit Pro in 2004 and it only gets better with age. Once you get part the overwhelming feature rich UX you are going to love this software.

It does have quite an extensive amount of features and therefore it can have quite a steep learning curve. Probably not the best software for the none techie who isn't intimidated by loads of buttons and options. Apart from this, I love Audition.