Adobe Audition Review (2023)

Adobe Audition is powerful, cross-platformaudio editing softwarethat's in a category of its own. For example, Audition has specialized tools for cleaning up or restoring audio and offers precision, nondestructive editing for corporate and commercial video, as well as podcasts. It's absolutely stellar in post-production, unlike Audacity, which is admittedly a much simpler program. In a pinch, Audition also functions as a digital audio workstation (DAW), though it's too limited and expensive for that market given its lack of music composition tools. From topping off your audio clips and getting them to sit just right in a final video project or podcast, to crafting sound effects for video games and ducking music to spotlight voiceovers, Audition excels.

Pricing, System Requirements, and Setup

Audition began its life as a program called Cool Edit by Syntrillium Software. I remember it from its multitrack-enabled Cool Edit Pro days. Adobe bought the product from Syntrillium in 2003, relaunched it soon after as Audition, and has developed it ever since.

As with other Adobe software, you "buy" Audition by subscribing to one of the company's Creative Cloud (CC) plans. Audition by itself costs a rather high $20.99 per month on an annual plan, or $31.49 on a month-to-month plan. It's is also available as part of a package with all of Adobe's professional products, includingPhotoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and more, for $52.99 per month as part of an annual plan or $79.49 month to month, although students and teachers can get it for as little as $19.99 per month. When you stop paying, Audition stops working and you keep nothing.

Whether any of these plans make sense to you depends on your needs. If you're the type of audio engineer who buys a program once and uses it professionally until it's no longer supported, years down the line, Audition will prove a much more expensive proposition thanLogic Pro(a flat $199.99 forever, with free upgrades). But if you tend to upgrade your audio workstation often, paying hundreds of dollars up front and then $99 or $149 every couple of years to get new versions, Audition makes more sense. Audition's best value proposition is if you're already working in Adobe Premiere Pro and pay for a full CC subscription anyway, in which case Audition is part of the package. Still, to put all of this in perspective, three years of working with Audition will cost you at least $755, and possibly more if you choose a different plan or go month-to-month. That's a lot.

To install Audition, you need a multicore PC running Windows 10 64-bit or a Mac running macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or newer. The biggest recent news is that Audition now runs natively on Apple M1 chips, which takes an already-fast digital audio workstation to another level. (A few less commonly used features, such as support for EUCON control surfaces, burning CDs, and several video codecs are still yet to be supported at the time of this writing.)

For this review, I tested Audition 22.0 on anApple MacBook Pro 16-inch (Late 2021, M1 Pro)with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD running macOS Monterey 12.3.1, with a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 USB interface attached. There's no hardware copy protection dongle required with Audition, as there is withPro Tools. You do need to run the Creative Cloud desktop app in the background, which you install as part of the setup process. By default, Audition CC collects usage data, and to stop it you have to manually opt out once the program is installed.

Audio Editing, Restoration, and Export

Audition offers two main modes: the Waveform view, for stereo editing, and the Multitrack view, for mixing tracks on a timeline. It's simple to flip between these two whenever you want. In the Waveform view, recording audio and adjusting its volume is simple, and an attractive spectral frequency editor lets you attack the recorded wave in different ways. You can punch a recording from a specific point within a clip and quickly zoom in to the same range on multiple selected clips.

The Multitrack view is where Audition takes on the look of a normal digital audio workstation. Here you drop clips of audio on different tracks, such as a voiceover on top of music stems or ambient sounds, or mix together recorded interview segments tocreate a podcast. As you'd expect, the interface is fully drag-and-drop compatible, and you can cut or trim clips for seamless nondestructive edits. That's unlike the Waveform editor, where edits are destructive.

Audition now comes with the ability to Strip Silence from inactive regions in recorded clips, without losing sync in multitrack audio—perfect for fast cleanup of interviews, podcasts, and other multitrack recordings. Strip Silence includes adjustable parameters to compensate for uneven volume levels between participants or background noise.

A sharp new Loudness Meter, which replaces Loudness Radar, lets you analyze full mixes, single tracks, or any bus or submix in real time, with presets for common regional broadcast requirements as well as all the latest streaming services such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Netflix. This is one of the trickiest aspects of producing audio these days, as every service seems to have its own idea of a target LUFS level (and the nature of LUFS is such that it's not really a fixed target to begin with). It will certainly save you trips to loudnesspenalty.com(Opens in a new window) or similar benchmark tests.

Other nice features: DeReverb is a useful tool that lets you reduce or even remove any reverberation in an existing audio file. It can handle big spacious reverbs or short delays (echoes). DeNoise removes hiss and hum from existing files, but in a way that's more transparent and certainly easier than the older Noise Reduction feature. Instead of requiring you to first create a noise print from a quiet period of the audio, or fine-tune the exact frequencies and dB levels, before you got an acceptable result, DeNoise does in real time with no latency. You just have to control how much noise reduction you want. It also lets you preview the noise print it's removing on its own as a reality check.

The Sound Remover tool is another winner; you can get transparent results using it to remove an errant bump, paper shuffling, or even a car alarm from an otherwise perfect take. The auto-ducking works with ambient sounds, and you can enter time and parameter values for keyframes manually.

The Mixer view looks a little cluttered, mainly thanks to overly thin sliders, but Audition's metering and support for console effects are plenty strong. Using the Multitrack view, it's easy to strip multiple audio channels fromMXFand other types of video files. For example, if you record a scene for film or television using multiple microphones (or even in 5.1), the program lets you store each recorded file in its own channel in the file, and then configure the routing of the source channels to each corresponding clip channel. Adobe also builds in an Essential Sound panel, which is targeted at beginners. To use it, you select a clip and then choose a Mix Type, such as Dialogue. The program then shows you only a few crucial adjustments that are probably the most important for that task, like repairing a click or making it sound clearer. The program includes more than 50 audio effects in total.

One of Audition's most powerful features is its Favorites, which let you set up macros that perform a series of common operations on wave after wave, such as normalizing or converting to stereo. In tandem with Favorites is Batch Processing, which lets you perform tricks like matching up an entire group of clips to broadcast regulation standards, or analyzing the frequency and even phase of recordings—this would have saved me a ton of time on some older video game sound design projects I worked on years ago. In addition to the new Loudness Meter, the program still makes it easy to export broadcast-ready audio in a variety of formats to comply with loudness standards in film, television, commercials, and radio around the world.

Scoring and Music Production

Adobe has tightened up its marketing around live multitrack recording and no longer pitches Auditon in this fashion, but it's worth noting Audition's limitations. The audio rendering engine is powerful enough; it can handle up to 128 tracks or record 32 tracks at once without stuttering. You can also select, adjust, and delete multiple tracks simultaneously. Audition comes bundled with several thousand royalty-free loops and over 10,000 sound effects to get you started with post-production.

Audition also offers a music Remix tool that attempts to automate cutting new versions of a song without having to send it to an actual remixer or mix engineer for changes. It lets you adjust a song's target duration to get exactly the right cut. Say you shorten the song by 30 seconds; the Remix tool will literally go in and adjust the segments of the song and transition them in a way that resembles splicing tape, and that's pretty much seamless to the listener assuming it's not a song most people recognize. You can customize the splices by telling it to favor shorter segments with longer transitions or vice versa. More importantly, the program can be configured to favor rhythm (timbre) elements so that the beat always stays locked when necessary, or favor harmonic structure when it's a group of vocalists or stringed instruments playing that don't have an easily discernable beat attached.

I find the Remix tool great for library tracks you're not super-particular about or custom music composed for a particular project. But having worked on the other side of this as a composer for years, I'd still say just ask the composer for their opinion and possibly an extra cut of the song at a different length, if it's possible within the parameters of your contract with them.

If you're coming from Avid's Pro Tools or another DAW, though, note that Adobe doesn't include any software instrument libraries with Audition. There's no score editor, and not even internal MIDI support. Now that every major DAW offers comprehensive audio and MIDI recording features, I wouldn't recommend paying this much for an audio workstation without any music-related facilities included. You could argue that this isn't part of Audition's intended mission, but at its price level, the omissions are harder to forgive given its other scoring and post-production facilities. Audition can help score video, but, aside from the aforementioned Remix tool, it generally assumes the music is done already.

That said, if you've already got Audition for other reasons and want to use it to record a band, you certainly can. You can even pitch-correct vocals and master the track with the included multi-band compressor and limiter. But you'd be better served by our Editors' ChoicesApple Logic Proor Pro Tools. And there are always third-party add-ons like Izotope Rx for restoring audio in another DAW, should you need similar tools to what Audition offers for other kinds of projects.

A Focused Audio Editor

Adobe bills Audition as "designed to accelerate video production workflows and audio finishing," and that's really its key market—and where it excels. If you're a podcaster or video editor looking for a complementary product to beef up the audio in your projects, or especially if you work with (and are already paying for) other top-level Adobe software like Premiere or Photoshop, Audition is a natural fit, and its new Loudness Meter and comprehensive audio restoration and polishing tools are excellent additions. Audition even sends audio back and forth with Premiere, instead of forcing you to do cumbersome bounces each time. Workflow enhancements like this amp up the value of the full CC subscription. In my tests, I also found Audition to be the ideal step up fromAudacityorGarageBandwhen recording podcasts as well.

Our 3.5-star rating of Adobe Audition remains a split decision: It's a 4-star product for those who are working in post or who already have an Adobe subscription for more of the company's products and a 3-star utility for everyone else.