Philip Colmer
08-19-2004, 05:00 PM
<img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-audition-cover.gif" /><br /><br /><b>Product Category:</b> Audio editing and looping<br /><b>Manufacturer:</b> <a href="http://www.adobe.com/">Adobe Systems Inc</a><br /><b>Where to Buy:</b> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00021XJ6O/ref%253Dase%255Fjasondunn-20/jasondunn-20">Amazon (affiliate link)</a><br /><b>Price:</b> $299.99 USD<br /><b>System Requirements:</b> 400MHz or faster processor, Microsoft Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional or Home Edition, 64MB RAM, 75MB available disc space, 800x600 colour display, stereo sound card, CD-ROM drive.<br /><br /><b>Pros:</b><li>Wide range of effects processes supplied;<br /><li>Large library of loops included;<br /><li>5.1 surround mix capability.<b>Cons:</b><li>No ASIO support;<br /><li>Poor reliability with CD ripping;<br /><li>Over-complicated.<b>Summary:</b><br />Adobe Audition, previously known as Cool Edit Pro, provides a lot of functionality and sophistication for a good competitive price. It has some great features but the user interface needs improving and simplifying.<br /><br />Read on for the full review!<!><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>The Sound Of Music</b></span><br />As Adobe prepared their Video Collection portfolio, they needed to plug the audio gap in their suite. With Pinnacle buying Steinberg and Sony buying Sonic Foundry, they needed to do something to keep up with the competition. It was a choice of writing something themselves or buying an existing product, so they bought Cool Edit Pro and renamed it Adobe Audition.<br /><br />For the 1.0 release, Adobe had not done much to the software so any fans of CEP will be completely at home with the renamed product. Although Adobe has now released version 1.5, this review is looking at the initial version.<br /><br /><span><b>The Good ...</b></span><br />There is no doubt in my mind that Audition delivers a lot of functionality for a reasonable price. Here is a quick overview of what you do get for your money:<li> A multitrack mode that allows you to record, mix and edit up to 128 stereo tracks. You can record up to 32 inputs, use real-time effects and EQ on every track, play back video and MIDI files. Note that in order to support multiple-input recordings, you must have a sound card that supports this.<br /><br /><li> A wave-editing mode that not only allows you to record and edit tracks but also provides sophisticated tools like frequency and phase analysis during playback. You can also perform waveform analysis to get statistics like peak amplitude, minimum and maximum RMS.<br /><br /><li> More than 50 DSP tools and effects, mastering and analysis tools, audio restoration features and third-party DirectX and VST plug-ins. Not all of the effects supplied are real-time (for example some of the complex reverberation effects) but the software allows you to change the display order so that it becomes easier to see which ones are real-time and which ones aren't. For the non-real-time effects, it is possible to cache the rendered version and then lock down the track, thus minimising CPU usage. If you need to go back and change something, you can unlock, re-render and lock the track again.<br /><br /><li> Support for 32-bit audio using sample rates up to 10MHz including the standard rates used by CD and DVD.<br /><br /><li> More than 4,000 royalty-free music loops from diverse styles like Rock, Techno, Classical and Reggae. You can create your own loops from wave files and the software includes beat detection capabilities to make this easier. Changes to the tempo and key for a composition are then applied to the loops to ensure consistent playback. It is possible to change that behaviour on a per-loop basis.<br /><br /><li> Audio restoration features that allow you to remove hisses and hums, fix clipped audio, apply noise reduction and more. Many of these often provide good results with little more than a couple of mouse clicks.<br /><br /><li> Support for a wide range of industry-standard file formats, for VST and DirectX plug-ins and for ReWire to enable working with products such as Propellerhead Reason and Ableton Live.<br /><br /><li> Multichannel encoder, allowing you to create a 5.1 mix from your multitrack session. Audition can output that mix as 6 separate wave files, a single interleaved wave file (for use with Adobe Premiere Pro) or as a Windows Media 9 file.<br /><br /><li> Support for "Edit Original" functionality in Premiere Pro, thus allowing you to easily edit an audio track in Audition and then push it back to Premiere Pro without having to leave the applications.<span><b>The Bad ...</b></span><br />One thing that I really think Adobe should fix now and make available as a free upgrade is support for ASIO. ASIO, or audio stream input/output to use the full name, is a protocol devised initially by Steinberg and then adopted by many sound card and audio software suppliers. It provides two significant improvements over traditional mechanisms for software to "talk" to the hardware:<li> The ASIO driver allows the host application to see all of the inputs and outputs available on the sound card. The user can then assign these ports as needed for recording or playback. This allows the user to record more tracks simultaneously.<br /><br /><li> The ASIO driver reduces latency in the audio chain. Latency is best explained through an example: playing back a very simple composition on my computer and setting one of the tracks to solo takes roughly a second for the change to be audible. Imagine trying to fine-tune the parameters for an effect if you've always got to wait a second before you can hear the results ... By having low latency (i.e. in the millisecond range), you eliminate this problem.Curiously enough, Premiere Pro does support ASIO so hopefully Adobe will add this in due course.<br /><br />Another feature I'd like to see added is level meters for the individual tracks. It is all well and good having an overall level meter but that doesn't help you pinpoint which track is peaking if you can't see the contributory levels. There is a really nice track mixer but it doesn't have the levels visible against the tracks.<br /><br />One final feature that is bad is CD ripping. It is bad because it doesn't work - well, it doesn't on my system and I know from the forums that a lot of other users can't get it to work either. Adobe has made an ASPI patch available, but that hasn't fixed it, nor has installing the complete ASPI system. Life should not be this complicated - if other products can just rip CDs without getting into this level of badness, there must be something wrong with Audition and Adobe need to fix it.<br /><br /><span><b>And The Ugly</b></span><br />All that is ugly about Audition can be summarised in one phrase - the user interface. I really don't like it. Now, I know that this is definitely one of those "personal preference" things and I've tried to cut Audition some slack here, but the interface is not only physically ugly but logically appalling as well. Here are some examples:<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-audition-fig1.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 1: Audition settings</i><br /><br />Figure 1 shows an example of part of the settings window in Audition. The layout is cramped with little structure to it and the overall effect is one of eyes glazing over, not knowing where to look first. Compare that with Figure 2 which shows Premiere Pro's preferences - this uses a much simpler layout and the left-hand navigation strip means that the settings can be organised into more groups that the older-style tabbed window can easily support. Now, clearly, this design is part of the heritage of CEP and not Adobe's influence but it is an area that needs to be improved. Another issue with Audition's settings is that they are complicated. Who knows what "use sound card positioning info" means? It doesn't even appear in the help text!<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-audition-fig2.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 2: Premiere Pro's preferences window</i><br /><br />Even if the particular option does appear in the help text, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to understand it. Try this:<br /><br /><b>Open Order</b><br />This setting determines the order that the sound card device drive will be opened for use in the multitrack environment. Because the multitrack environment requires full-duplex capability, it will "open", or ready, both playback (out) and record (in) on the card. Some cards require this order to specific, but most don’t. Owners of the Digital Audio Labs CardD should set this option to Rec, Play. Owner of Sound Blaster cards should set this option to Rec, Play.<br />What I would really like to know is this: why don't other products have this option? Why is Audition so complicated?<br /><PAGEBREAK><br />The main window isn't too bad, but I found it a bit overwhelming the first time I saw it. Have a look at Figure 3 and see what you think.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-audition-fig3.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 3: Adobe Audition's multitrack mode</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-audition-fig4.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 4: Audition with everything undocked</i><br /><br />Most of the various parts of the window are actually dockable windows, so you can end up with something that looks like this Figure 4. What I struggle to like about the design of this interface, though, is the main multitrack area. There are a few aspects that are too unintuitive for my liking - maybe it is because I've been working with other Adobe products for too long and Audition isn't consistent - but here are my thoughts:<li> Changing the horizontal and vertical zoom can be done in three ways: the zoom controls, resizing the horizontal and vertical scroll bars or putting the mouse pointer over the scrollbar and using the mouse wheel.<br /><br />My main problem was finding the scroll bars. In case you can't spot them either, they are the small vertical green rectangle to the right of the first track in Figure 3 and the longer horizontal green rectangle going across the top of the tracks. They just don't look like scroll bars to me. Scroll bars should, at the very least, have arrows at each end so that it is visually obvious that it is a navigation aid.<br /><br />It doesn't help that they are in a non-standard location for scroll bars. Scroll bars ought to be on the right-hand side and below the item you are scrolling. You can change the position of the bars in Audition but it isn't something you'll find in Settings. No, you have to right-click on the scroll bar and then pick from a menu.<br /><br /><li> Picking up on the final point from above, Audition makes a lot of use of right-clicks. I don't have a problem with that - the right mouse button exists for a reason. What I do have a problem with, though, is that the designers have broken a fairly basic tenet of using the right mouse button - don't ever provide functionality through that mechanism that is not available elsewhere. Just suppose, for example, that your right mouse button is broken and you are waiting for a new mouse to come. With Audition, you would be completely stuck. There is a whole shed-load of functionality that is only ever available to you through the right mouse button.<br /><br />Want a good example? Moving blocks in the multitrack view. Yep - you have to right-click, hold and drag to move blocks around. How unintuitive is that!?!? If you look at alternative Adobe products like Premiere Pro, or competitive products like ACID, they avoid this sort of problem by using different tool modes, e.g. draw tool, select tool and so on. Audition doesn't work like this so you have to click and drag in specific ways in order to achieve the same results. The net effect is that if you are new to the product, you are going to find it a steep learning curve.<br /><br /><li> Playback in multitrack mode had me confused for a while. Not because I couldn't find the play button but because, every so often, playback would stop part-way through. At first, I thought it might have been because of some edits I was making at the time but it kept on happening even if I wasn't touching the software during playback. Eventually, I twigged it - by default, playback starts from where the cursor is and stops when the cursor reaches the right-hand side of the window.<br /><br />In order to get Audition to play beyond the right-hand side of the window, you have to click on the "play to end" button instead of the "play" button. Huh? Why? What is so special about the right-hand side of the window? It is almost as if Audition treats the space between the cursor and the RHS as a time selection - again, though, without the use of a time selection tool like ACID.<br /><br />It just goes to show, though, that even during a review you can find out new things. By right-clicking on the play button, I've just discovered that you can change the behaviour of the play button. You have four choices - play view (i.e. just what you can see), play from cursor to end of view (the current setting), play from cursor to end of file (what I would have expected) and play entire file. And guess what! The "play to end" button has the same four choices, so you've basically got two configurable play buttons. Go figure!Here is a strong suggestion to Adobe - <b>SIMPLIFY!</b> Audition has got too many user interface tweaks and adjustments and it is confusing, buried and muddling.<br /><br /><span><b>Entering The Fifth (.1) Dimension</b></span><br />When Adobe announced Premiere Pro, one of the strongest improvements made was in the audio department. With the addition of support for 5.1 surround sound, you could really start to get into the movie making business.<br /><br />Where Premiere doesn't help you much, though, is in the creation of that 5.1 mix. True, you can take multiple mono and stereo audio tracks and mix them into a 5.1 master track. You can even alter the panning of the sounds over time. However, the pan control is small and you won't get very accurate positioning from it.<br /><br />Enter the multichannel encoder in Audition (Figure 5). From here, you can select each track in turn and either specify a fixed playback position in the surround space, or you can vary that playback position over time by using pan envelopes. For each track, there are two envelopes - one that defines the right/left position and another that defines the front/rear position.<br /><br />To define the envelopes, you have to move the cursor to the point in time where you want to set the keyframe and then position the pan head to where you want the sound to emanate. It would be fantastic if Adobe could enhance this to allow you to position the pan head while the track is playing, thus allowing a more organic creation of the envelopes.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-audition-fig5.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 5: The multichannel encoder</i><br /><br />On the whole, though, the process works really well. I only have one gripe about the way it works at the moment and that is that when playing back all of the tracks, you cannot mute or solo any of the tracks. If you want to reduce the number of tracks that are being played back, you have to make that decision before starting to play the tracks. In addition, if you play a single track back, you cannot swap to a different track without stopping first. If Adobe could enhance the playback to allow you to dynamically change which tracks you are listening to, just like you can in the multitrack editor, this would be amazing.<br /><br />When you've finally created your masterpiece, you can export it to one of three formats - six separate wave files, a single interleaved file (for use with Premiere Pro) or a Windows Media Audio 9 file.<br /><br />If you are creating a mix for speech and sound effects, you normally want to be quite subtle about your placement of the sounds. A really good surround sound mix shouldn't have you thinking "ah, yes, that came out of the rear left speaker". On the other hand, if you are creating a mix for music, all of the rules get thrown out of the window - you can be as precise or as arbitrary as you like. Surround-sound music is something to behold and if you like Mike Oldfield or the Blue Man Group, I can heartily recommend their 5.1 albums "Tubular Bells 2003" and "Audio" respectively.<br /><br /><span><b>Some Examples</b></span><br />For your hearing pleasure and edification (or not!), I've got two examples. The first is a little something I put together using some loops supplied with Audition. I'm not very good when it comes to music so making music is not something that comes easily. I'm quite pleased with the end result of this effort though. Apologies for the bit of noise at the end of the track - it looks as if Audition has got a bug in its export processing.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Messing Around.wma">Messing Around</a> - 1.44MB<br /><br />Since my step-son has more musical ability in his little finger than my whole body, I asked him to come up with something that would help demonstrate the 5.1 capabilities. I've made this available as a Windows Media track. If you've got Windows Media and a 5.1-capable sound card, you should be able to get the full-on surround experience. If you've got surround sound in your living room but not on your computer, wait until the review of SurCode for Dolby Digital - the 5.1 encoder plug-in for Premiere Pro, where I'll make available a DVD image containing a Dolby Digital encoded version of this 5.1 mix.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/files/LostInTimeandSpace.wma">Lost In Time & Space</a> - 3.50MB. Please note that this is copyright © 2004 Dave Tupper. Please do not use this file for any purpose other than private listening.<br /><br />If you have any problems playing these files, you may want to save them to your computer first.<br /><br /><span><b>Conclusions</b></span><br />You'd be forgiven for thinking that because this review comes across negatively that I don't like Audition. I do. It certainly has a very strong feature set and for a good price. However, I do think that the product is over-complicated in places and could do with some simplification. Hopefully, once Adobe has some time to spend on it, it will start to look and feel a bit more like some of their other applications.<br /><br />5.1 encoding is, from a prosumer perspective, very much in its infancy and there aren't many tools available that will allow you to create a 5.1 surround mix. Audition has a good interface for handling this but, like the rest of the product, it could do with enhancing if it is going to stay ahead of the pack.<br /><br />If Adobe can add ASIO support then they really will have a winner on their hands with this product.