Adobe Audition

G

ggrantly

Veteran
Up to now, I've been a die hard Apple hardware and software guy. That is changing on the software side, though I will stick with Apple hardware for now. Though I've never been much of an Adobe fan, but I've been compelled to subscribe to CC for other reasons and now have access to the whole shebang. For those of you who have used it, how do you like Audition? Is it any good for CPU (MacBookPro + Motu Traveler) recording which I intend to do some soon? Has it been buggy beyond the norm? I assume at my modest editing skill level it would have more features than I need or understand. Anything it doesn't do well? I might use Audition with Primiere and Aftereffects so any thoughts there would be appreciated. I might be adding timecode capability before long, so any issues there?

This software migration is a real bummer.

Not sure if I will use Audition or anything Adobe, but I feel some due diligence is needed since my subscription includes it…..makes it darn near free except for the marriage with CC forever and ever.

Grant
 
I really love the entire CC suite and Audition is a solid audio sweetening/editing platform.

I too was on the Mac but transitioned over tot the PC.

Adobe CC runs great on both.
 
A lot of folks who were on FCP moved to Adobe. The biggest reasons were the middle finger that Apple gave it's professional users with FCPX. Folks stuck with FCP7 for awhile partly because Apple kept promising to add back the features they removed. CC can open old FCP projects so migration should be semi painless. Haven't used Audition, but PP can export to OMF and AAF so if it doesn't work well you can export to a sound person, which you can't with FCPX.

As far as Mac OS VS Windows... Hard to tell. I was on Windows once upon a time, and have been Mac for a few decades. When I moved it was because ProTools only ran on Mac's then. Since both systems have changed a lot. OSX is a shell on top of Unix so there is a really long and solid history. Windows hunted around for some time and for way too long was still built on a core of DOS. Recent versions though I believe have been pretty solid.

However both have been moving toward a tablet like OS and a very consumer oriented experience. Both are working hard to keep all the complexities away from you and that is great, till it isn't. I mostly have recent experience with Mac so not sure how Windows stacks up right now, but the last ten years or so have been a challenge for professional users on Mac. They keep changing core technologies like QuickTime forcing updates that keep orphaning hardware. The old big plus was you could keep the Mac hardware chugging along for years, this is hard to do now.

Also PC's were loud, really loud. To get a quiet one was quite expensive. Apple hardware was quiet and then almost silent. Some PC folks finally cought on that this could be a selling point and there are some that compare decently with Mac Hardware. And of course the latest mac Pro's don't support cards so are less than useful for many folks.

A number, growing number, of folks have moved to Hackintoshes. PS hardware hacked so it will run Mac OS. I know of a fair number of sound editors who went that route when they finally had to upgrade. The price is not that different but they don't have to replace all of their ProTools hardware, as they would with Mac hardware, so that is a $6,000 to $15,000 savings.

By all reports this has been working great for them.

When my beast dies I will be doing something similar, or possible going all the way to Windows. I find it visually ugly but that may just be me.

Apple software has always been a forward only design. Filemaker used to drive folks nuts with the inability to save to an older version and then we realized that all Apple products act this way. Really unfortunate. So as much as I like some of the software from a starting user perspective from a pro perspective I can't deal with stuff that can't save to an earlier version. I work with way too many people that are not all going to be on the same version for that to work for me.
 
Scott, you are pretty spot on with my feelings towards Apple and with me, that dates back to the Apple II. Apple, at one time was great about running legacy software, now, not so much. I now have four, yes four bootable drives in my tower. And yes, Apple has crapped on me as a professional, not that they don't make a nice product, they do, but much of my third party software remains a generation or two behind Apples relentless pace of OS upgrades. To me, much of this seems like change for the sake of change. All things being equal, I'd probably upgrade to FCPX and logicX but that is over $600. And recently Apple announced they are dropping Aperture in favor of something watered down like iPhoto-plus. So I'm already imaging a new storage and editing scheme for my photography files.

Although I have had very mixed feelings about Adobe, I have to admit getting hosting services for five websites and the entire software suite for $50/mo is pretty hard to beat. Having said that, I have found much of their software buggy and arcane on the Mac; Acrobat in particular. And, their software marketing policies have been borderline predatory. But as long as I'm paying for CC, I might as well give it a try.

Grant
 
Not to go too far afield with this and I should say that I largely love the hardware, but Apple really blew off professional users and seems to have really embraced it's new image as a consumer product company instead of being even partly a computer company.

When I lived in SF I was a member of SF Cutters which was the first FCP users group. It was really interesting because Apple has traditionally not supported user groups in any way. So while everyone else in the world was sending swag and giving discounts or other bits to help the group stay afloat nada from Apple. In the last years I was there we regularly met at the biggest supporters headquarters which was Adobe. Adobe was very generous with space and help of all sorts. By 2010 or so the membership has less than 50% FCP users, a lot of talks were on things that cross over so it was still useful and there were folks like me who are sound editors mostly just trying to stay semi fluent in what video was going to be sending my way and how to deal with it. So associated FCP users groups officially changed their names to "Pro Users Groups" and welcomed in Avid and Adobe and ? as supported platforms. It had been moving that way for awhile because of changes by the others that made them more "friendly" but FCPX was the straw that changed it.

Professionals had invested a lot of time and money in FCS learning and hardware and to have major parts of the workflow just flushed down the drain was a killer. At the same time others were making it very easy to switch so there was a lot of pressure for facilities to move to something that they could depend on being compatible next year.

I think the trash can MacPro may have done it for some of the graphics folks. It's hard when you have $$$$ invested in hardware and suddenly they make a change that orphans all of it.

For a lot of sound editors of a certain age it was the PCI -> PCIx -> PCIe adventure. ProTools (the pricy version) is based around hardware cards that do all the heavy lifting. Apple changed busses and dropped the old with glee leaving folks with thousands of dollars in hardware that wouldn't work in the new boxes. One can be kind of OK with the necessities of change till you realize that the non Apple boxes using the same CPU's etc still have PCI slots. So if I get a Hackintosh I can use my existing hardware with out a problem, it's only if I stay with Apple that I have a problem.

Now for a company who make most of their money from things that have nothing to do with computers it kind of makes sense, maybe. The short sightedness is the same as the thread about SD making $100 boxes, and that is the consumer market has zero brand loyalty. Computer users, especially professional ones, have a LOT of brand loyalty so housing them makes you very dependant on keeping up with the "next new thing" buying public.

So kind of like you we have five Mac computers around here and none have moved past 10.6.8 and only one can.

It's not a big deal mostly, ProTools is very happy on a G5 with lots of memory and there are not really any new features that I'm jonesing for for sound post. The latest and greatest PT can open any of my sessions with out a hitch and they can save to my version with out much of a problem. If I were a big music user maybe the tricky plugin translations might be an issue but not for post.

I dabble in programing and the laptops that can't go past 10.6.8 are at a slight issue since Apple basically forced everyone to move to at least 10.7 if they want to be able to sell through the Apple store. So anybody who went that marketing route pretty much had to orphan users who can't update the OS.


OK back to the topic.

After Effects is pretty much the standard for less that $$$$$ visual FX. Motion (if it still exists) was really fast but had some problems when you needed stuff to happen at a specific time. So for quick really good looking stuff it was hard to beat but for more film oriented tasks it could be problematic.

PP has some really nice features that FCP never had. If you do Doc.'s it has a voice recognition function that does a half way decent transcription of the dialog. Once that is done you can search for words by characters and it will locate to the footage based on that. Not sure how much it's improved but the demo four years ago or so was quite impressive.

Photo Shop is also basically a standard in photo editing.

Not really familiar with the rest of the suite but I have heard pretty good things about the script writing app and the sound app.

For editing Avid has gotten a lot friendlier and affordable. If you need VFX though you would probably be getting After Effects so now your in Adobe land so...
 
Scott,

At this point when you think Avid - Protools, do you worry that something bad will eventually happen. They have been bleeding big money for an extended amount of time. They have had significant layoffs. Even if Protools is doing fine as an app, eventually something has to give with Avid.

Photoshop may be the defacto editing standard for major editing tasks, but there really is (was) a significant amount of photographers that used Aperture for most things and added in either plugins or other apps and skipped Photoshop mostly or entirely. For those of us who try to take photographs that require only modest editing, the Aperture workflow was just fine except for the addition of something like Portrait Professional. With the demise of Aperture, those folks, me among them, are looking for a replacement workflow.

Back to the topic:

It seems that Audition has a positive aura, has anyone used it for field recording?

Grant
 
Digi has made a bunch of bad moves since Avid bought them so yes I can see problems in the future. Waveframe was the standard befor ProTools snuck in as the bargain DAW and really grabbed the market. They had made a program for Avid called AudioVision and when they decided to merge it with ProTools that kind of killed the competition.

PT went from a tiny toe hold to major player in a couple of years so they could certainly go away just about as fast. Which is part of the stupidity of stopping the big upgrade discounts. If it costs me a fortune to upgrade I will look at options. If I'm not working a lot with other PT users or on a bunch of big films it pretty much doesn't matter what I cut on.

Nobody on the Mac anyway has a solid alternative for post except maybe Nuendo. It's not cheap but it has a following, especially outside the US. Reaper has a lot of users in the US but with out solid OMF AAf support it's kind of a non starter.

The biggest thing PT has going for it right now is a LARGE user base, and who wants to lean a new system. So unless they piss of the base, or go chapter 11, they probably will be around for awhile.

Photoshop is more for editing for print or making plates for After Effects than a photographers tool.
"Capture One" is photographer software that I know of that photographers like.

The Orphaning thing is another consumer VS professional issue and something Apple has fallen down on the job about in recent years. Professionals do NOT want to learn new software all the time, they want to hone their chops on the software they are using. Features are nice,stability and continuity are king. Adobe does seem to get this, Apple not at all.

But I have my 1/4 deck so I can always go back to something that is still reliable ;~)

If you are on a Mac I would take a hard look at "Boom Recorder". Sounds like a game but it's boom as in boom mic. Anyway it is rock solid and can record a TON of tracks even to USB, has prerecord buffers and you can take notes and generate sound reports as you go.
http://www.vosgames.nl/products/BoomRecorder/

And it has been used on major features and TV so strong track record.
 
Audition works fine, and on my mac, I use it for live recording from an X32 system. However, I just don't like it. I am happy with Cubase on my PCs, and Sony Sound Forge as my preferred audio editor. Audition works fine, but is just a bit longwinded. It annoys me that if I set up a project to record say, 32 channels from the X32, and then save it - it doesn't save the input routing that you set up one by one. Sure, I could do a template, but having patiently set input 1 to channel 1 on the drop down menu system, then 2 to 2, then 3 to 3 etc etc, you save the empty project. However, if the X32 is disconnected, or powered down, on re connection, the routing does not get put back when you load the project. Cubase, saves these settings. Maybe Audition does too, but I haven't found out how to do it so far!
 
Adobe Audition works fine for me

Adobe Audition works fine for me

Editing audio for video with Audition should meet your needs, but ProTools will likely have better tools for surround sound applications (and certainly for music composing). As you already have access to the Creative Cloud apps, why not download it and take it for a spin?

I do a mix of print media work and video, and Adobe's Creative Cloud apps work very well for me, and the subscription cost is justifiable. The integration between apps isn't seamless, but CC does offer flexibility and efficiency that can help your work flow. I worked with ProTools LE up to version 8, and it was a love/hate thing with frequent OS and hardware battles disrupting my work flow. Although I miss some of ProTool's features, editing in Audition has been much easier, faster and rock solid (not a single crash compared to countless PTLE crashes).
 
paulears said:
Audition works fine, and on my mac, I use it for live recording from an X32 system. However, I just don't like it. I am happy with Cubase on my PCs, and Sony Sound Forge as my preferred audio editor. Audition works fine, but is just a bit longwinded. It annoys me that if I set up a project to record say, 32 channels from the X32, and then save it - it doesn't save the input routing that you set up one by one. Sure, I could do a template, but having patiently set input 1 to channel 1 on the drop down menu system, then 2 to 2, then 3 to 3 etc etc, you save the empty project. However, if the X32 is disconnected, or powered down, on re connection, the routing does not get put back when you load the project. Cubase, saves these settings. Maybe Audition does too, but I haven't found out how to do it so far!
Click to expand...

I have set up an 8 track recording from a Steinberg UR 824, with input routing. I closed the project, disconnected my computer, and returned a few days later. When I re- opened Audition, and opened the saved project, I initially thought the routing had been lost, but I found it was necessary that the hardware was on, and I selected the correct input source for audio hardware for Audition to restore the saved routing. Worked well.
I'm using that cc version of audition.
******
Edit: So I tried it again tonight, and the channel routing was not there and I could not resurect it. Had to re-enter the routing.....so if there is a way to fix it, I'm fat. If not, maybe time to learn ProTools. Honestly I've been very happy with Audition for my relatively simple editing in post andd the only reason I'm considering changing is for the occasions when I need to record multi-tracks (small orchestra).
 
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I use Pro Tools ALL the time but if what you need is to record sound and not post for video something like Reaper is probably a better choice.

The reasons are that it is quite a bit cheaper and has a nice tool set. It doesn't import OMF so it's a less than good choice for post work but it's fine for recording and edition. Protools is not a gentle learning curve and it has a fair number of quirks, as in you need to be VERY careful about OS and software upgrades. PT generally takes a year or so to catch up to Mac OS changes so there is this dance you need to do where you buy an OS update then wait till PT is compatible and then upgrade both. By the time PT is compatible Apple is often about to or has released a new OS version and you as a rule can't get the older OS at that point.

So PT can be a happy camper on a dedicated machine but if it's on your everyday box you need to be very careful about any upgrades.

BTW any program is going to throw an error or "fix it for you" if the hardware you set up a session with is not available next time you try to open the session.
 
Thank you, I'll try the Reaper. Much appreciated advice, I have my hands full with the video side of my work and would like to avoid the ProTools learning curve as well as expense.
 
FYI, Reaper was loosely modeled after Vegas by Justin Frankel of AOL and Winamp fame, but is not quite as intuitive as Vegas IMO. Vegas Pro BTW IS a formidable DAW in it's own right, despite being marketed for video. In fact, the original (Sonic Foundry) Vegas 1.0 was a DAW (audio only). If I recall correctly, Vegas 2.0 had two versions, audio only and audio with some basic video editing. Sonic Foundry (Sound Forge/Acid/Vegas) was also one of the first to use 32bit floating point architecture. Adopted by Avid starting with SloTools 10.
 
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