Before I start this review, I’d like to give you some background information on my user scenario and how I arrived at Adobe Audition 3. If you’d like to skip past the background, feel free to go directly to the “REVIEW STARTS HERE” section.
BACKGROUND INFO
I’ve had a home studio to record my musical experiments for over a decade now and until the last year or so, my weapon of choice had been an analog Vestax MR-44 4-track recorder and a Boss DR-550 drum machine. The sounds I generally capture are my voice, acoustic and electric guitars, and an electric bass.
I’ve dabbled with computer based multi-tracking in the past: I tried to use standard pc soundcards such as the ESS, SoundBlasters, Sigmatel, and integrated chipset sound solutions that have come with my computers and tried to work with cheap software such as Windows sound recorder, the stuff bundled with Nero, Pro Tools Free, and Audacity. I’ve never been very happy with the sound quality and also the limitations and clunkiness of the software and end up reverting back to my analog solution…
Needless to say, after years of torment, and also the fact that I can no longer buy blank cassettes anywhere, I decided to follow the saying, “you get what you pay for” and set out to make a little investment, within reason of course, in my multi-tracking rig. After much research and literally years of debating, my first step was to bite the bullet and purchase the M-Audio Fast Track Pro.
The Fast Track Pro has been an outstanding hardware interface so far…as long as I turn off the wireless network card in my laptop while recording. It supports up to 24/96 and has balanced/unbalanced analog I/O, provides phantom power, etc. It’s very portable, and provides me with a very crisp and clear sound with really great signal to noise ratio. That being said, it was only one part of the equation, the other was to acquire a decent multi-track capable DAW to run on top of it.
My Fast Track Pro came with Ableton Live Lite 6. Unfortunately for me, it had a pretty steep learning curve. This was due to a quirky UI interface. Also, it seemed that Ableton Live Lite was really geared more toward electronica and live performance than it was to home studio multitracking with analog instruments. The final straw was that the “Lite” version was very crippled and it would not allow me to us external VST hosts on both my bass and guitar at the same time. I also really didn’t feel like dropping $350 to upgrade to the full version with the things I’ve already pointed out.
So, since the Ableton Live Lite 6 route didn’t work out, I started looking around. My first thought was to look at CakeWalk software, remembering them being king back in the day, but they didn’t have any trial software and I wasn’t about to drop dime on something I’ve never used…especially on audio software which is notorious for being buggy.
The next thing I looked at was Pro Tools since it is the defacto standard and also because my Fast Track Pro is M-Powered. However, at the time I looked, they didn’t have a demo version available. Once again, I do not buy without try. Side note, as of this writing I realize that I can now download a Pro Tools M-Powered 7.4 demo. Interesting.
After Pro Tools I played with M-Audio Session. It came with the KeyStudio 25 I bought after my Fast Track. Vaguely reminiscent of when I played with garage band…you know officially I run Windows. 
However, M-Audio Session was the biggest hunk of crap I’ve ever installed. I couldn’t even get through a 2 minute take without the program throwing an exception, exiting and causing me to redo my all my work. Heck, I even tried the updater and looked through the support forums that were virtually empty…on to the next product.
However, M-Audio Session was the biggest hunk of crap I’ve ever installed. I couldn’t even get through a 2 minute take without the program throwing an exception, exiting and causing me to redo my all my work. Heck, I even tried the updater and looked through the support forums that were virtually empty…on to the next product.Although M-Audio Session was horrible, the next product I decided to play with was Sony’s Acid Pro 6. It’s actually a product that had been started by Sonic Foundry back in the day. For those of you that have used Acid Pro in the past, version 6 added a wealth of features enabling Acid Pro to be a true DAW. Features such as MIDI and multitracking, ASIO driver support, and VST among other things.
To be honest, I enjoyed Acid Pro 6. It didn’t seem too buggy, the UI interface was much easier to figure out that Ableton Live, and I was productive and comfortable using Acid Pro within a day. However, the reason I just enjoyed and didn’t REALLY enjoy Acid Pro is that the interface was really, really ugly and way too busy and cluttered for my taste.
That being said, the good really outweighed the bad and I was about to drop the dime when someone told me…hey, you’ve heard of Adobe Audition, right?
“Adobe, what?”, I said…
Remember that program Cool Edit Pro that everyone used to rave about? Adobe bought it when it was version 2.1 and Adobe Audition was born. Actually Adobe Audition 1 was a re-branded version of Cool Edit Pro with hardly any new features…similar to some of the *cough* Macromedia stuffs that we now know as Adobe stuffs. History lesson over…on to the goods.
First off, as usual Adobe did a great job with UI design. The interface is very tight, slick, and uncluttered unlike the Sony product I had tried. I also had no problems picking it up like I did with Ableton Live. I was multi-tracking in about 30 minutes.
Multi-tracking with Adobe Audition 3 is a dream. I like to sing along with my bands tracks to rehearse. I drag and drop an mp3 or wma down on track one, then I record vocals into any of the remaining tracks as this image shows.
As I run through the song I just keep recording into new tracks while muting previous vocal tracks on each round, that way I can hear previous takes, and playing with stereo vocals is pretty fun when I’m bored. The default session is 6 tracks and a master, but if I need more tracks I just hit my ALT+A shortcut to add more.
Now…no one likes dry vocals and guitar when they’re playing around and practicing. The effects that come with Audition are plentiful and have many customization parameters to tweak. I really like the effects rack feature it brings me back to the days of playing with my ART SGE Mach II which I still have and it still works. The cool thing about the effects rack is you can add numerous effects, play with the parameters, save user-defined presets, and as you can see from the image below, it comes with a good deal of built in presets.
The cool thing about the effects rack is you can add numerous effects, play with the parameters, save user-defined presets, and as you can see from the image below, it comes with a good deal of built in presets.
Now that I’ve mentioned multiple tracks and numerous effects, you’re wondering, well what about performance? My rig is an Inspiron 9400 with Core 2 Duo @ 2 Ghz and 2 GB RAM and so far I’ve played back up to 6 simultaneous tracks with multiple real time effects and it runs just fine! I’ve also not noticed any issues with recording with several tracks playing in the background.
As far as noise levels during recording, I really like the way they implemented the noise-level meters so that you can quickly dismiss a “RED” clipping indicator via a double-click. The other thing is since I find it kind of hard to use the dials with my mouse, I like that you can just click into a value and change it manually.
Pulling out a demo cut is a breeze and you can export directly to an mp3 file if you just want a quick track to send to your band mates. That’s actually something that I could never get figured out in Ableton… Oh, and if you don’t want to export to mp3, just take a look at the list of choices in the image below.
Some of the other things to point out is that editing in the multi-track view is non-destructive, and you can loop a segment and just continue to record until you get it right. A wav file will be saved for each pass which you can then access via the handy Files panel as shown here. Now, just keep in mind that if you switch to the Edit view, any changes you make in that view are destructive.
The edit view is pretty interesting and there’s many differenct audio visualizers to help you with cleaning up sound…but frankly I’m not a sound engineer and much of that stuff is over my head. I also have a very short attention span for that level of tweaking. Here’s a pretty little screenshot of the Edit View though.
Here’s a pretty little screenshot of the Edit View though.
Some of the other things that I’d like to point out about Adobe Audition 3:
- It comes with a metronome and works with many of the industry standard acronyms such as VSTi, SMPTE, MIDI, and ASIO.
- I need to buy a foot controller, I’ve read in the user guide that Audition can map keyboard shortcuts to MIDI controllers. This is my first priority on something to check out when I have some time. I would love a punch-in/punch-out foot controller for when I’m laying down guitar tracks.
- Audition is lacking the ability to allow you to lay down some audio using a MIDI keyboard which is kind of a bummer. However, although I haven’t tried it yet, Audition does have rewire support so that you can use Audition as a rewire host. When I get a chance, I’ll hook my MIDI keyboard up to Ableton Live Lite 6 and run it as a slave to Audition…wish me luck!
- From reading the user guide, you can use clip and track envelopes to automate volume, pan, and effects. I don’t know about you but I don’t think I can change those settings fast enough during a mixdown with a mouse.
- Audition works with video, so that you can use it to do scoring. It also works with Adobe Bridge and can be round-tripped pretty easily with After Effects and Premiere Pro.
- I’ve read a good portion of the User Guide. It’s very straighforward and has a lot of good concise information to get you going quickly…including a quick chapter on digital audio fundamentals!
- If you get the boxed version, it comes with a hard-copy user guide, the “Loopology” loop library DVD, and Adobe CS3 video workshops.
Now…before you go thinking I had nothing negative to say…there are a couple things I’ve noticed that I’m not too keen on:
- When I first installed Adobe Audition 3, it crashed on multiple occasions while multi-tracking or playing back with multiple effect rack effects turned on. That being said, I’ve since updated the ASIO drivers for my Fast Track Pro and it hasn’t crashed since, knock on wood, needless to say it may have been the ASIO driver and not Audition 3.
- An ongoing issue is that the Transport pane which contains all the player buttons such as record and fast forward will go completely disabled. The only way to wake it up is to run the scrubber over the tracks…weird and not too annoying considering the awesomeness of the product.
- In some slightly common instances the UI will refresh very slowly and in chunks. For instance, panels will be just blank canvases without the sliders and dials. This occurs even when I’m not playing any tracks… on the other hand, it hardly ever happens, but it does happen enough for me to notice. Who knows, it might be my video card driver and not Audition?
- It’s Windows only! I’ve been wanting Mac OS X for a while…if I switch…bye bye Audition.
- It’s not a part of Creative Suite! Ok now Adobe, now my two main Adobe apps Flex Builder and Audition are red-headed step children? Are you trying to say I’m not creative if I use these products instead of Soundbooth and Flash IDE?
Anyway, enough of the rant. I did save it for last, but as you can see the awesomely, awesomeness that is Adobe Audition 3 seriously out-weighs the bad. For about $350 bones you can acquire an outstanding and very feature-rich DAW to accompany your recording hardware. It’s pretty, it’s plentiful, and it’s powerful…it’s Audition 3.
Source: http://jun.realeyes.com/?p=165
