January 2009 Archives

Just catching up from going to the NAMM show in Anaheim, CA earlier this month where Audition 3 received the Electronic Musician Editors' Choice Award for best audio editing software. I was presented the award from Gino Robair the Editor of EM at their annual EM/MIX/REMIX party at the House of Blues in Disneyland. You can read the review in this month’s issue of EM and perhaps you’ll see my smiling face holding the hardware in an upcoming issue of EM. And of course Audition just keeps getting better with the recent release of 3.0.1. Thanks to the team and to all our beta testers for their continued help and support.

I also got to spend a day going around the show looking at all the new music toys. Moog was showing off their Moog Guitar, which gives you e-bow like effects on all 6 strings. It’s very cool, but also a bit pricey. Our friend Skipper and the folks at Blue Microphones keep turning out cool new products including a mic for the new iPod/iPhone and a USB microphone interface called the ‘Icicle” which enables to you plug any mic into your computer. This will be great for recording with a laptop on the road. I’m also looking forward to getting one of the iPod mics (“Mikey”) to help capture song ideas when I’m out and about. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used voice mail to capture a song idea when I didn’t have an instrument around. I suspect there are a lot of other songwriters out there that have done the same. I also had my eye on some of the new TC-Helicon vocal processors demoed at the show. They have some great stuff for enhancing vocal performances in a live setting.

Walking around the show you see the occasional “rock star.” They usually come out to the show to do the autograph thing at various booths, but occasionally you see them actually playing live. I caught Tony Levin (Peter Gabriel, King Crimson) performing with an acoustic group at the Beyerdynamic booth.

Cheers,
-Lawson

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Roger McGuinn, the legendary singer/songwriter and founder of The Byrds, who continues to be a vital voice in the music world today. We talked about how he’s used Audition in his solo career, including the critically acclaimed Folk Den project where he posts a traditional folk song on-line every month. He’s been an Audition fan since the Cool Edit Pro days and he uses it for every part of the recording process from laying down basic tracks, recording overdubs, mixing, mastering and CD creation. You can view highlights of my conversation with Roger on AdobeTV.
http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1508v1000

Many thanks to Roger and his wife Camilla for allowing me (and a small film crew) to come into their home and have this conversation about music and technology. We filmed the interview in Roger’s den, which is where he keeps all his computer hardware and a wide variety of electric and acoustic guitars that he has mounted on the walls. There was also a lot of other great memorabilia, which we captured in the video as well.

One thing we didn’t show in the video was Roger’s collection of vintage transistor radios. Roger was inspired to create music back in the ‘50s when he first heard Elvis on a transistor radio. In many ways, the transistor radio was the iPod of the 50’s and 60’s. And while recording and playback technology have come a long way since then, great songs can inspire us no matter what medium we use to hear them. Thanks Roger for continuing to inspire us with your music.

-Lawson

We are happy to announce that the Audition 3.0.1 patch has officially been released on Adobe.com. This patch resolves several issues reported by our users over the past several months and will enhance the stability and overall performance of Audition 3. You can click on the link below to review the list of changes made and download the patch.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4237

I did want to highlight a few of the key updates in version 3.0.1.

Multi-Core Processor Support
First, we have resolved several problems reported by users who have machines with CPUs that have 4 or more cores. Users will now be able to perform all spectral and waveform editing operations no matter how many cores the processor has.

Windows Vista 64-bit SP1 Compliance
For those of you running Windows Vista 64-bit with Service Pack 1, you will be happy to know that Audition 3.0.1 is fully compliant with the 64-bit version of Vista's latest Service Pack. If you happened to be one of the users who upgraded to Vista 64-bit SP1 and found that Audition 3.0 would no longer launch, installing the 3.0.1 patch will resolve this issue.

Fixes for Roaming Profiles and Non-Default Folder Locations
We have also resolved a few issues regarding the location of the users “My Documents” folder. With Audition 3.0.1 users will no longer have difficulties launching the application when the user directory is located in a non-default location. This includes cases where the user profile is located within a roaming profile, which is not found on the local machine.

Return of the Graphic Phase Shifter
The patch also includes the Graphic Phase Shifter effect. This effect was included in Audition 2.0, but was inadvertently left off of the Audition 3.0 DVD master and was instead made available on Adobe.com.

Overall Stability
In Audition 3.0.1 we have fixed several problems that could potentially cause the application to crash in certain situations. These fixes can be found in many areas of the program including the waveform editor, spectral editing views and the multitrack environment. Regarding multitrack stability, this patch has numerous fixes to resolve reported problems of crashing and session corruption. Thanks to all our forum users and beta testers for helping us identify and resolve these issues.

Enjoy!
--Ron

Ron Day
Quality Engineering Lead