Adobe Audition CC
Audition CC brings some really cool new features, including the revolutionary new Sound Remover and the super-useful Preview Editor. This release is packed with goodies, including enhanced multitrack, new sound design tools, Audio Finesse workflow refinements, ITU Loudness metering, and lots more. For a detailed overview of the new features, check out Durin’s awesome Adobe Audition CC preview post from last month, or the Reveal videos we did for NAB.

Adobe Creative Cloud
And the coolest feature in the Audition CC release is Adobe Creative Cloud. Why? Because the world we live and work in is changing as we become more connected and more mobile. We see huge scope for evolving the creative process so you can harness these exciting new capabilities in your work – that’s what Creative Cloud is about. Creative Cloud gives you a new kind of platform for creating, collaborating, and then delivering your best work to virtually any device or audience.

Creative Cloud was first launched one year ago and it has already been more successful than we dared to hope. Well over half a million members have signed on so far and the number is climbing daily because people love the new model. It’s easy to budget for and it is much more than just a great way to deliver software to your desktop. Creative Cloud brings together everything you need together to streamline the creative process from start to finish:

• Collaborative Tools: powerful Adobe applications like Photoshop and Illustrator have been reinvented to support a more intuitive, connected way of creating.
• Community: showcase your work, get feedback, and gain global exposure.
• Publish: deliver your creations in immersive, engaging new ways.
• Stay Inspired: No matter how creativity evolves, Creative Cloud lets you evolve with it.

Run the tools on your desktop, connect the creative process in the cloud
The awesome new CC applications, like Audition CC, still run on your desktop, the same as before, but Creative Cloud provides more: installations, updates, files syncing, posting work to Behance, notification, and invitations to collaborate are all managed through Creative Cloud. It’s your new creative dashboard.

Discover Creative Cloud for yourself
If you join Adobe Creative Cloud today, you will immediate access to the current versions of our applications. Next month, you will be able to download Audition CC – along with the rest of pro video applications, including Adobe Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC, and all the other CC tools, such as Photoshop CC, and much more. Then, as new features become available (and they will), you’ll be able to download the new version right away. The days of waiting 12, 18, or 24 months for new releases are history.

You can also join for free and get 30-day trials of any Adobe Creative Cloud desktop application. Paid membership offers ongoing access to all of the Adobe creative desktop applications, including new features as they become available, along with online services for file sharing, promoting your work, publishing, and more.

Don’t miss our special offers on Creative Cloud!.

A CD Layout consists of audio files, CD Track marker ranges, or a combination of both, inserted into a list.  Each item, as well as the project itself, can contain metadata including title, genre, composer, message, ISRC, MCN, etc.  A layout file may be saved and opened again at a later date to burn additional copies or to make changes.  The typical workflow will be to open the media you intend to write to CD, create a CD Layout, make any changes to the arrangement or metadata, and burn to physical media.

You can create a new CD Layout via a few methods:

• File > New > CD Layout
• The New CD Layout option from the New File button in the Files panel
  
• Select one or more audio files in the Files panel, right-click, and choose Insert into CD Layout > New CD Layout (or an open CD Layout)
• Select one or more CD Track markers from the Markers panel (see screenshot below,) right-click, and choose Insert into CD Layout > New CD Layout (or an open CD Layout)

CD LAYOUT PANEL

CD Layouts are an alternate view of the Editor panel that allow you to drag-and-drop audio files and CD Track markers, re-arrange their order, adjust their pre-track pause duration, and view and edit CD-TEXT metadata.  You can drag files directly from the Files panel or the Media Browser panel, or drag CD Track markers directly from the Markers panel.  By default, the Markers panel only displays markers for the active file.  You can quickly view markers for ALL open files by selecting the “Show markers of all files” toggle button located near the top-right of the Markers panel:

It is important to note that only CD Track markers from an audio file may be inserted into a CD Layout.  If you’ve created CD Track markers in a multitrack session, you will need to perform a session mixdown first – the CD Track markers will be inserted into the mixdown and can then be added to a CD Layout.  You may modify the default “Pause” value under Preferences > Markers & Metadata > Default CD track pause  Redbook CD standards require a 2 second pause before the first track, so you will be unable to modify this specific field.

The CD Layout panel displays each track, an editable Title, pre-gap pause duration, and other information associated with the track.  Almost any field may be edited by clicking in the existing text.  Additional track-specific editable fields can be exposed by right-clicking the column headers and selecting the fields you wish to view:

You can modify the overall CD-TEXT fields for the entire layout by opening the Properties panel and exposing the CD Text group:

When your layout is finished and your desired CD-TEXT complete, you can bring up the Burn Audio dialog by clicking the Burn Audio to CD… button located in the lower-right corner of the CD Layout panel.  This dialog help select the device you wish to write to, select the number of copies you wish to make, and offers a few additional options.  (Obviously, make sure you have a blank audio CD in the drive, unlike me!)

At this point, it might be worth noting that CD-TEXT support is up to the playback device or application, and support can vary.  If you’re on a Mac OS X system, you can verify the full CD-Text of an audio CD by opening Terminal and entering the following command:  drutil cdtext        I am unfamiliar with any similar command for Windows systems.

Audition has a whole bunch of awesome new features on the way, and I wanted to share them as soon as we got the go-ahead.  We’ll go into more detail on each of these over the next few weeks, but I hope this whets your appetite for what we’ve been working on. Our approach has always been a balance between our own research and innovation, and the great  input we get from you, our users.  I think we’ve built some unique new features this release, and answered a lot of workflow demands from our customers.  Let’s get right to the good stuff!

Sound Remover
It’s a slightly better name than “Semi-Supervised Source Separation,” but that’s the technology that’s happening under the hood.  While our standard Noise Reduction excels at removing consistent background sounds, leaving the primary signal intact, our new Sound Remover tool is built to unravel primary, dynamic sounds from a recording, minimizing artifacts and loss to other, overlapping sounds.  Here’s a before-and-after shot where Audition has removed a siren that occurred during an outdoor interview.

After training the tool to identify the sirens, visible as arcs in the upper view, the new Sound Remover tool carefully lifts this signal out of the recording while minimizing damage to the interview and environmental sounds we want to keep.

Preview Editor
If you use Audition, you will have noticed something funny about the screenshot above – dual editor views!?  Audition’s new Preview Editor provides a multi-purpose second viewing pane enabling editors to edit or compare multiple regions of a file simultaneously, quickly zoom into a selection without losing your place in a file, or visually preview effects – especially those that affect the duration and playback speed of a recording – so you can confirm your modifications or timing before applying the edit.

64-Bit Performance
With this release, Adobe Audition will be a fully 64-bit application capable of accessing oodles of RAM, taking advantage of the latest and greatest hardware and operating systems, and supporting the next generation of VST and AU audio plug-ins.

Editable Favorites, Favorites Panel
Keep your favorites accessible at all times with the dockable Favorites Panel.  Did the boss demand a change to an otherwise automated set of actions?  No need to start all over: just pop into the Actions Editor to change the parameters for any recorded Favorite.

View, Sort, Run, and Edit Favorites from a convenient, always-available panel.

New Sound Design tools and effects
One of the most common requests from CS6 users was to bring back some of their favorite sound design effects.  So how’s this?  The Pitch Bender is back, and makes full use of the on-screen envelope to allow you sample-accuracy when warping and bending sound.  (And using Pitch Bender with the Preview Editor view gives you almost instant feedback on how your waveform is being warped, stretched, and bent.)  Several other effects see new interfaces and functionality including the real-time, automatable Pitch Shifter and Stereo Expander.  For those who love the graphs and maths, the Scientific Filter enables highly accurate and repeatable filtering and correction.  This release welcomes an improved Generate Noise tool with new noise profiles, and enables Noise and Tone generation directly into your Multitrack timeline!

Pitch Bender is back and better than ever! Real-time, automatable Pitch Shifter, Scientific Filter, and Stereo Expander help warp and change your sounds to match your ideas.

Enhanced Spectral Frequency Editing
Back is the ability to make multiple spectral frequency selections,  and add to or remove from existing free-form selections.  This functionality enables users to carve very delicate selections, identify harmonics, and even draw their signature into their sounds. Sometimes it’s easiest to select a single piece of audio when what you really want selected is everything EXCEPT the selection – easily accomplished with a single click of the new Invert button!

Multitrack Enhancements

So many “little” enhancements have been added to Multitrack based on user requests that it’s hard to decide where to begin!  Most visual is the new Track Colors which allow you to color-code your tracks for easy grouping and identification.  Smart clip color behavior allows flexibility in how clip colors behave when moved from one track to another.

When dragging clips into a session, the “little orange bar” is gone. Audition will now display the full clip and waveform when dragging a file into a session. This also includes automatically displaying and creating crossfades when a newly-added clip overlaps another.  Remember when you would drag or paste several clips into a session and they were stacked, sometimes in an apparent haphazard fashion?  Not anymore!  A global preference now determines whether multiple clips are stacked in separate tracks or placed consecutively in a single track, with a simple modifier key to alternate between the two behaviors. Please hold the applause, people – there’s more!

Easily keyframe clip silence in a keyframe with a single operation. No more will you need to carefully create 4 keyframes on the clip volume envelope, then carefully move two of them down and line them up to the others.  If you prefer to just select and delete, that works, too.  But now, once you’ve sliced and diced a clip into pieces, Clip Merge will perform a render-and-replace to quickly simplify your session.  New commands make selecting all clips in a track, or all clips forward or backward from the playhead, a simple right-click or shortcut key.

Smart Track and Clip Colors improve organization and at-a-glance editing in Multitrack

Navigation Improvements
Many of you use Audition because you face strict, short deadlines and Audition is quick and nimble enough to keep up. Usually. For those of you who operate on a higher plane and for whom time holds a looser leash, we’ve introduced several navigation improvements, by special request. With a host of new shortcuts to arm, mute, and solo tracks, Zoom commands for quickly jumping to an almost-microscopic level of detail around a selection, and shortcuts for fully zooming a selected track, you can now work as fast as you can press a key or two. Additional commands allow users to jump between markers, ignoring any clips or other content in between, or to adjust their view from the keyboard without modifying their selections or playhead.

Frequency Band Splitter
I decided to list this separate from some of the other effects because it has been a long-overlooked tool in Auditions toolbelt.  We’ve brought the Frequency Band Splitter back from Audition 3, gave it a beautiful interface, and put it into the Waveform editor view where it belonged in the first place!  Quickly and easily split a recording into a series of frequency-limited pieces and remix, repurpose, or rebuild a recording.

The new Frequency Band Splitter tool allows you to separate a file into frequency-limited pieces. What you do next is entirely up to you!

Miscellaneous Bits of Awesome
View details about the audio data under your cursor, and see up-to-the-second details about your disk space while recording.  Configure or change the default name for new markers.  Allow Audition to automatically match your device sample rate to the active document or cancel all running operations if you need to shut down in a hurry.  Adjust the metronome from the mixer.  Improved accuracy of sync and silent regions with the Automatic Speech Alignment tool.  Export your files directly to your SoundCloud account and share with the world.  Stop playback at end of selections.  Advanced options when Mix Pasting audio.  Native WMA and WASAPI driver support on Windows.  New audio formats available on OS X!  AAC and iTunes metadata support!  More, more, more!

I’m really excited to be able to share all the work we’ve been doing this year, and Audition is now positioned well for the future.  Please stay tuned and we’ll go into deeper dives of these new features, giving you the details you’ll need to create and deliver your audio and have a great experience doing so.

How to get Adobe Audition Next
The release date has not been announced, but there is a great way to get yourself to the front of the line. If you join Adobe Creative Cloud now, you will immediately receive the entire stable of currently shipping Adobe CS6 applications AND you will automatically receive the new versions of Audition and all your other favorite Adobe applications as soon as they are available. From April 4 through 19, 2013, we’re offering our NAB Show Special giving you 40% off Creative Cloud for your first year – that’s only $29.99/month It’s an amazing way to keep your production costs really low and your tools up-to-date all the time.

Learn More
Discover more about what’s coming to the next versions of the Adobe pro video tools at: adobe.com/go/nab_reveal.

For this example, I downloaded an hour-long Grateful Dead performance * from archive.org and opened it in Audition.  My first step is to make a selection around each song and create a CD Track Marker.  CD Track markers automatically conform to the minimum increment durations defined by the Red Book Audio CD standard, and are used by Audition when exporting a file to CD.  You can use the SHIFT+M shortcut to create a CD Track marker from any selection, or change the type of existing Cue Markers in the Markers Panel.

Making sure the regions I want in my final CD are set as CD Track Markers

With each song identified and marked, I’m ready to burn a CD for the daily commute to work.  By selecting File > Export > Burn Audio to CD… from the menu bar, I can quickly create a CD without having to create a full project.

A quick option for burning an Audio CD.

Some details about the Burn Audio to CD command.

A few options for the burn process.

A CD ready to pop in the car!

That’s it!  The Burn Audio to CD command makes it quick and simple to burn a multitrack CD from a single, long-form recording.  It’s a great solution for breaking down long takes into chapters or tracks, such as lectures, book readings, or live performances.  But what if you want to produce a more professional CD with tracks from different sources?

Up next in this little series: Creating structured audio CD’s with Audition’s CD Project editor.

Still on the fence about Adobe Audition?
Why not get it through Adobe Creative Cloud? Creative Cloud includes all of the Adobe desktop applications, so you can try out other applications like Adobe Premiere Pro, Muse, Lightroom. With Creative Cloud you keep all your Adobe applications up to date for one low monthly fee – including future versions when they become available. Try it now for free!

* While archive.org offers this performance as separate tracks, I had previously combined them into a single FLAC file.

If you missed the live broadcast, you can still watch Create Now on Adobe TV.

Yesterday also saw the announcement of Creative Cloud for Teams - a better way of working together.

Recommended reading: our colleague Kathy Charneco has written a great post on the Pro Video Coalition blog - Reinventing Video Creation with Adobe Creative Cloud.

New to Audition? Download it as part of your Creative Cloud membership - or get a 30-day free trial to test it out.

Well, today we are delighted to announce that the winner of the draw is … (queue pristine audio of drumroll) … Tom Evans of Dublin, California!

Tom Evans of Off Ramp Music takes the call.

Tom has a small studio called Off Ramp Music where he records bands and does other projects using a classic analog front end, including mics, compressors and a nice big mid-80’s console. The audio is then processed through a Lynx AD/DA and captured on a Windows 7 machine running ProTools HD, Sonar X1 and very soon … Adobe Audition!

“I’m really excited to get my hands on Audition,” said Tom from his home when we called him with the good news. “I just coincidentally started a short film project and plan to use Audtion/Premiere Pro as an opportunity to explore the features and work flow. I’m also looking forward to working with Premiere Pro and learning more about video editing. I love the multicam editing features.  I also appreciate the VST3 support.”

Tom is from the Bay Area and is a civil engineer by day. He is also a musician and has played bass and sung in a local band for over twenty years. He studied recording in San Francisco.

We wish you every success, Tom! Enjoy Adobe Audition and Production Premium.

But wait, there’s more…
And for those of you who didn’t win Production Premium, take advantage of special upgrade pricing on Creative Cloud: all the Adobe creative applications for just $29.99 per month.

And if you are switching from a competing application, we have a Creative Cloud offer for you, too – until Nov. 30.

One of the first things people saw when they entered the Moscone Center North was the Adobe sign on the press office.

Attendance for AES seemed to be strong, despite travel disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy in the east, and the excitement of the World Series in San Francisco.

9:59 am on Saturday: crowds waiting eagerly for the 133rd AES Show to open.

Visitors to the Adobe booth were impressed by Automatic Speech Alignment, the EUCON controls surface support, incredible OMF support, and tight integration with other applications  in Audition CS6. Other favorites with visitors were popular features such as the Photoshop-like repair tools in the Spectral Frequency Editor, the multitrack environment, and many “niche tools” such as batch processing for game sound designers, automatic and manual pitch correction, volume matching, and recordable favorite actions.

We had visitors who still use previous versions of Cool Edit Pro and Audition and a few who were still upset about the interface changes we implemented between Audition 1.5 and Audition 2.0!  We love the loyalty and the passion of our users!

We had two two demo stations for Audition CS6: a powerful HP Z1 all-in-one Windows machine and a sleek new 15″ Macbook Pro with Retina Display.

Many visitors were really interested in the Creative Cloud subscription model, especially with the current introductory pricing of just $29.99 per month. People liked the fact that Creative Cloud provides access to all the Adobe desktop applications, including tools such as Dreamweaver, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Photoshop, as well as all of the production tools, including Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and that audio crowd favorite, Audition CS6! Visitors also liked the fact that they can keep all the applications up-to-date without having to pay extra when new versions are released.

The Audition booth crew: Charles Van Winkle, our on-site audio scientist; Durin Gleaves, Audition team lead; Eric Philpott, Audition marketing manager; and Mingliang Pan from our Audition engineering team who came all the way from Beijing to join us for the show.

We all really enjoyed our experience at AES. We want to thank the AES organizers for a great show and especially the many customers and friends who came by the booth to say hello. It is a wonderful and humbling experience to meet the people who are using our software day-in and day-out. Thank your for your questions, your challenges, and your kind words: we’re thrilled to be working with all of you.

Happy audio editing everyone!

Audition CS6 has been so well received by reviewers and production professionals around the world, and you now have several options for buying it. Along with boxed versions (or “shrink” as they call it here), and purchasing online, you can also subscribe. That last option is a great model. We encourage you to take a good look at Adobe’s Creative Cloud Membership.

As a value proposition, Creative Cloud is pretty much unbeatable: download and use the entire collection of Adobe’s professional applications. All of them, as well as services like Business Catalyst or Typekit. The standard price of $49.99 per month is less than most cell phone plans or cable TV subscriptions.

The value proposition is even better when you consider some of the cool new apps that are exclusive to Creative Cloud, such as Adobe Muse, the new web design application, or Adobe Story Plus, which is otherwise only available on its own as a subscription. And Lightroom, the popular digital photography workflow management application is included, too.

Adobe Creative Cloud – the future of creativity

Audition users and production companies will benefit from flexible pricing, where you can add or remove seats, depending on your current workload. You may also find the 20GB of included storage useful, for example if you are moving between an office and a home computer to work on a project.

More and more of us use a variety of devices. We want to be able to access, share, and work on content wherever we are. That is why cloud computing is growing so fast right now. With Creative Cloud, Adobe is building an awesome digital hub for integrating your tools and your workflow. Hop on board!

Creative Cloud members will always have access to the most up-to-date software, and they get an integrated platform for their creative workflow. If you already own Audition, Soundbooth, or Creative Suite,  we are currently offering special upgrade subscriptions to Creative Cloud for only only $29.99 a month.

If you are thinking of stepping up to Audition CS6, consider moving up to Creative Cloud.

Meanwhile:
Audition CS6 will be at AES in San Francisco, October 27 -29. We have free VIP passes to the show!

This update, version 5.0.2 for Mac and Windows, fixes several bugs discovered after release that could not be fixed in time for the earlier patch, and cleans up a few odds and ends to ensure Audition is fully compatible for use on Windows 8.  Briefly, here are the primary bug fixes:

• Metronone may skip or stutter
• Windows registry entry missing backslash in path
• Eucon/Avid Artist control surface touchscreen: Control of Surround Panner does not work
• Bounce to New Track > Selected Track: New track is now based on channelization of source track
• Windows 8: Third-party drivers do not have a valid WHQL signature
• CD Burning: Removed 78 minute limit from CD Layout.
• Audition may crash on Mac when exporting to OMF
• Audition may crash when attempting to bounce a track with a channelization that does not match the Master track
• All fixes and updates available in the 5.0.1 update.

You may install the update by selecting Help > Updates… in Adobe Audition CS6 or through the Adobe Application Manager tool.  Additionally, you may download the patch installer directly for Mac and Windows.

Participants chat amongst each other and ask questions to Kanen and the Adobe Audition team while enjoying an educational hour of audio production wizardry.

Kanen covered many topics, such as his round-trip workflow between Premiere Pro and Audition, the power of on-clip fade controls, his preferred noise reduction techniques, and spectral frequency editing.  The side conversations happening in the Chat pod were as fun as they were illuminating.  For example, did you know that MP3 output is optimized for -6dB levels while MP4(AAC) is optimized for 0dB?  Tips like that can make a big difference when you are prepping files for delivery.

Here, Kanen shows off a recent multitrack session for an episode of That Post Show. His use of clip color, grouping, and track organization makes editing a much simpler, faster process and helps ensure a quick release schedule.

You can check out the Audio Editing for Video Editors  “webinar” with Kanen Flowers anytime. Feel free to follow up with any questions or comments at the bottom of this page, or at the Adobe Audition User Forums.

About Kanen
Kanen Flowers is the creator of That Post Show, Scruffy Thinking, and The Scruffy Show (formerly That Media Show.)  Watch for his upcoming web series, Hero Punk.

Get Audition
Not using Audition CS6 yet? You can download a free 30 day trial. Or just go ahead and order a full copy or upgrade!

Audition is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, so you can subscribe and get access to Audition CS6, Photoshop CS6, and all of Adobe’s other creative tools.