Inside Sound

What's Dirk Sciarrotta's audio editor of choice? Adobe Audition CS5.5.

Sound editor extraordinaire, Dirk Sciarrotta, told us recently why Adobe Audition CS5.5 is his tool of choice when editing audio for high-profile broadcast and performance clients such as The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Family Feud, The Price is Right, Madonna, and Cirque du Soleil.

According to Sciarrotta, “The multitrack side as well as the edit side of Audition CS5.5 features more bells and whistles than you can imagine, yet the software is very user friendly.”

Additionally says Sciarrotta, “Adobe Audition CS5.5 is it for me. I’ve used Avid Pro Tools and BIAS Peak and Sony Sound Forge – you name it, but Audition CS5.5 is the most powerful, easy-to-use option.”

With 11 nominations and two Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Live and Direct to Tape Sound Mixing, the results of Sciarrotta’s use of Adobe Audition software speak for themselves. To read more about Sciarrotta’s work, click here.

Clips, tracks, waveform view—every mode gets an Effects Rack in Audition CS5.5.

The good ol’ Effects Rack. Could there be any better paradigm through which to apply and control effects to the tracks in a session? It’s got that real-world familiarity that simplifies audio recording and editing in the digital realm.

As good as it was before, the Effects Rack gets a significant workflow boost in Audition CS5.5 with the new modeless Effect Rack-that’s a fancy way of saying that no matter what edit mode you’re working in, there will be an Effects Rack available to you.

In the Waveform Editor, you can use the Effects Rack or Effects menu to instantiate, edit, preview, and apply DSP effects. In the Multitrack Editor, you can use the Effects Rack panel to apply DSP effects to individual clips or to entire tracks. On track effects, you can save CPU cycles by engaging the Pre-Render button, which applies effects to the entire track, without locking you out of the effects parameter controls.

There are many new and enhanced DSP effects in Audition CS5.5, including quite a few created by the audio geniuses at iZotope, including the new DeHummer, Surround Reverb, Speech Volume Leveler, and Vocal Enhancer, as well as the upgraded DeEsser, Single Band Compressor, Chorus/Flanger, and Phaser.

Find out more about the new effects workflows in Audition CS5.5. here.

Thousands of SFX are yours license-free with Audition CS5.5.

An install of Audition CS5.5 on your Mac or PC takes up a mere 300MB or so. Yet Audition comes with literally thousands of sound effect files that you can use license-free to create or polish soundtracks. Ambient sound beds, environmental backgrounds, Foley FX, explosions, automobiles, and dozens of other useful categories contain around 10,000 files in stereo 48k WAV format. That’s enough to let you create quite a number of soundtracks without ever repeating your SFX files.

All these SFX files are available for download through Adobe Resource Central within Audition CS5.5. All the SFX files are high-quality, 48k WAV files, so you can use them for the foundation of your sound design work, too. Using the amazing sound-bending DSP effects in Audition CS5.5 such as Stretch and Pitch, Distortion, Echo, and many more, you can transform a simple footstep into a menacing underscore or a sci-fi science experiment. Audition CS5.5 gives you the fuel for your soundtrack imagination!

Click on the image at left to read the entire list of SFX categories available. Each category can contain many hundreds of useful sound effects, from environmental ambiance tracks and background sound beds to Foley effects and sci-fi effects.

Worried about session files created with previous versions of Audition or Cool Edit Pro? Think those timeless tracks have been relegated to the digital dustbin of software history?

Relax! You’ll be able to open all those files within Audition CS5.5 by using a fantastic third-party utility called Ses2Sesx. Created by the awesome folks at AATranslator, Ses2Sesx will take any binary format session file from Cool Edit Pro 1.2 all the way up to Audition 3 and save it in .SESX format for Audition CS5.5.

Learn more about the Ses2Sesx converter utility here.

If you have Audition 3 and want your sessions to come across to Audition CS5.5, there is basic session export using XML session format in Audition 3, which Audition CS5.5 can open and convert to the new .SESX XML format. But for more comprehensive file conversion, check out Ses2Sesx.

Anxious whether your favorite AU3 features will be available in AUCS5.5 on Windows? Don’t worry! You can find a feature comparison here. You can (and should!) keep Audition 3 installed and running even after you install Audition CS5.5, so you can ensure you’ll have the features you’re used to as well as the increased power of Audition CS5.5.

With OMF interchange support, Audition CS5.5 can exchange files with Final Cut Pro and other NLEs.

Audition CS5.5 lets you export sessions in OMF Interchange format, as well as import OMF-formatted files. In plain English, this means that you can use the industry-leading audio sweetening, restoration, and cleanup tools in Audition CS5.5 in a video or audio editing workflow that includes any of the most widely-used video nonlinear editor programs (NLEs) or digital audio workstation applications (DAWs). Since many of our pro users tell us they often use Audition in shops that use third-party NLEs and DAWs, this will make one of the realities of pro video editing much simpler.

Still thinking WTF? Get clear on OMF here. Then find out more about how Audition exports and imports OMF files here.

Audition CS5.5 also supports the XML format, which is an open-source protocol that includes enough information about the elements contained in a particular file that the file can be imported into applications that would ordinarily not be able to read the data in a proprietary file format.

Eh? Simply put, it’s a way of allowing NLEs and DAWs (just to name two types of apps) to share files they ordinarily wouldn’t be able to. Since Audition CS5.5 auto-saves its XML, it’s also a great way for Audition to protect your audio in the event of a system crash: Audition would simply re-create your session from the auto-saved XML data, saving your valuable time.

Here’s more about XML than you ever wanted to know.

The new Track Panner works with mono and stereo tracks, and allows precise 5.1 placement.

If you’re equipped to do surround editing, Audition CS5.5 is the audio tool for you. With native support for 5.1 surround sessions and multichannel audio files, Audition makes it easy to create new surround sessions, or put the finishing touches on existing 5.1 projects, and save to a full 5.1 surround master. True 5.1 metering and effects are available on surround tracks and sessions in all modes, including the Multitrack Editor, Waveform Editor, and in the Mixer. Audition also saves and opens multichannel WAV and MP3 files.

You can freely mix new and existing mono, stereo, and multichannel tracks in the same session, assigning each track to any surround channels that you wish. Audition provides a comprehensive array of mixdown and file format options, so you can deliver audio that conforms to the requirements of the most popular stereo and multichannel formats.

Operating as a floating panel, the enhanced Track Panner lets you dial in the precise location of a mono track or the exact spread of a stereo track within the surround sound space. Track Panner icons on each track header give you quick visual feedback on the location of each track while you’re mixing.

With multichannel file support, Audition lets you edit self-contained multichannel files, processing each channel individually. A new Surround Reverb effect makes it easy to put the sounds of a multichannel file in the same ambient sound space, or give each channel its own unique sound. Audition lets you save multichannel files and mixes in a variety of multichannel output formats.

Get the 411 on the 5.1 power of Audition here.

From removing occasional clicks to fixing disastrous digital distortion, and from trimming silence to removing hiss embedded in a waveform—even making unusable dialogue usable again—Adobe Audition CS5.5 provides audio sweetening and restoration tools that are indispensable for professional video and audio work.

The new DeHummer lets you eliminate all types of hum while leaving dialogue and SFX untouched.

The new Diagnostics panel provides several effects—some new, some enhanced—and with a simple scan-and-repair process they give you vastly improved audio for video. The new DeHummer removes hum throughout an audio file immediately, but it goes way beyond just giving you a choice between 60-cycle and 50-cycle hum. With an intuitive interface, it lets you dial in the precise frequency of a hum problem as you listen, as well as tune in and remove its harmonics. You can leave the sounds you want undisturbed, which means more intelligible dialogue, and soundtracks with more impact.

Other indispensable effects include the DeClipper, DeClicker, DeEsser, Adaptive and Process Noise Reduction, and the new Speech Volume Matching effect, the latter of which lets you equalize the volume of different voice talent recorded in the same audio file, in spite of varying distance from the microphone.

For fixing audio problems fast, Audition is even more powerful than ever before. Find out more about the audio sweetening and restoration features in Audition CS5.5 here. Learn more about how the new modeless, shared effects controls work in Audition here.

Great audio is a team effort: Roundtrip editing between Adobe Premiere Pro and Audition

For you busy video editors—and that includes just about all of you—Audition CS5.5 works more transparently with Adobe Premiere Pro than before. If you have Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 installed and are editing the audio yourself, you can use the new Edit In Adobe Audition command to send individual clips, entire sequences, or just the selected work area—complete with reference video—directly to Adobe Audition for audio editing and sweetening.

• If you send an individual clip, Audition uses a Render And Replace process to automatically update the audio clip in Adobe Premiere Pro.
• With sequences, you can choose to place the rendered audio in the audio track of your choice.

To see more about how Audition helps Adobe Premiere Pro create better soundtracks, watch this video.

Click on a product name to see more about the new features in Adobe Audition CS5.5 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5.

Process audio in the background while working in the foreground.

Completely rewritten to take advantage of multicore processors on Macs and PCs, Audition CS5.5 provides substantial performance improvements compared to previous versions. The time it takes to complete many audio editing and sweetening tasks has been sliced to a fraction of what it once was. You can also pile on the intensive audio tasks such as processing large audio files in the background in the Waveform editor while you continue to play back and edit multitrack sessions in the Multitrack editor.

Background processing and audio multitasking means you’ll get more done in a shorter amount of time.

Many other workflow enhancements add to the overall increased efficiency of editing audio with Audition CS5.5. Track effect pre-render lets you apply effects to a track to free up CPU cycles, while still being able to change the effects settings on the fly. The new History panel lets you quickly return to earlier versions of audio files and sessions without having to reconstruct original settings. And with XML auto-save, you’ll lose much less time if you need to recover work.

Download the Mac preview version here until early May to see for yourself, and learn more about the new power of Audition CS5.5 here.