Inside Sound

We’ve been so busy with the launch this week that I noticed we hadn’t made a formal announcement to Inside Sound that Adobe Audition CS6 is available now!  You can download the free 30-day trial by visiting http://adobe.ly/IrXfBa

Colin also provided a very good overview of Audition CS6′s pricing, upgrades, and details about Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions on our User to User Forum.  I wanted to share them here, lightly edited, since I know many of you don’t visit the forums that often.  Please share any questions in the comments or on the forums.

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Audition CS6 Product Launch – Upgrades, Subscriptions, and Purchase Info

Creative Cloud and Subscriptions. Before you dismiss, I would encourage you to check it out namely because it, at the heart, is a different method of using Adobe’s software. For some it will make perfect sense and be the right fit for how you work, what you can afford, etc. For others, perpetual license (how we’ve always sold Audition and other products) is just fine and you can stick with that.

It’s important to be crystal clear on this “cloud” stuff: getting Audition (or any other Adobe application) via subscription/Creative Cloud does not mean it’s running OVER the Internet or is web browser-based. It means you get a subscription authorization using your Adobe ID login and download your software from our site (as if you bought it as per normal.)  The install process will then authorize your login against your subscription. It’s that simple. There has been some confusion and concern with folks thinking you’re running the application “in the cloud” (i.e. connected at all times to the web) and that’s not the case.

Availability and “Try before Buy”:

If you have doubts about Audition CS6…PLEASE *TRY BEFORE YOU BUY*, we have 30-day trial versions available as always from the product website on Adobe.com. Please download and try it first before clicking buy. Getting a refund is a pain and we just want you to be a happy user. We have been trying to get out as much info as early as we can on this forum, our blog, twitter, etc. about what is in the release and what’s not.   There is a full 3-version feature comparison matrix available at http://www.adobe.com/products/audition/buying-guide-version-comparison.html

Creative Cloud Membership:

• Get ALL Adobe’s desktop products including Audition CS6 and a few other interesting things like online storage, preview, sharing, etc for $49.95/mo (Yes, that’s basically Master Collection + more for $50/mo). And I believe there’s an introductory price of $30/mo (for one year) good until end of August.  For some this is huge. If you use nothing but Audition, we get it, go ahead and head to the next item, but if you want to do other things like use Premiere Pro, After Effects, and/or Photoshop Extended too, this is worth looking at…
• Go here for more info: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html

Audition CS6 Perpetual:

• Full = $349.00 USD
• Upgrade Audition CS5.5 to Audition CS6 = $75.00 USD
• Upgrade Audition 1.5, 2.0, 3.0 to Audition CS6 = $149.00 USD
• Upgrade Soundbooth CS3, CS4, CS5 to Audition CS6 = $149.00 USD

Audition CS6 Only Subscription (i.e. not Creative Cloud or Suite):

• Month to Month Audition CS6 = $29.95/mo USD
• Yearly Audition CS6 = $19.95/mo USD

Students/Education:

• Some of you noticed Audition’s educational pricing went away this past year (along with that pricing on many other products), Well there will be a Creative Cloud Subscription plan for you which will give basically EVERYTHING we make. Check out the Creative Cloud link below…  It’s $29.99/month.

IMPORTANT CHANGES IN UPGRADE POLICY YOU SHOULD KNOW:

Adobe’s new policy (announced last year sometime, I don’t have a link handy) is to only allow perpetual upgrades from 1 WHOLE version back and one 1/2 version back instead of the “3 version back rule”. While the product teams do not set any pricing or upgrade policy, we can certainly make a case for our customers and in this case we noticed the 3 version back upgrade policy was off the table for Audition (i.e. the proposal we saw was to only allow upgrade from CS5.5 and 3.0). We know and respect that many folks did not take this upgrade in CS5.5 who are still on version 1.5 or 2.0, so we fought hard to get a special exception for Audition. There is a caveat…Next release, we have to give up the exception so be aware: if you’re on v1.5 and you want to upgrade, do it this release. If you absolutely love v1.5 or v3.0 (or Soundbooth) and will never change no matter what we do going forward, then we’re fine with that too (really, we on the team know some of you just love 1.5) but we wanted to be clear the upgrade window is closing for you this release.

Reference Links:

More info on Creative Cloud Here: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html
Audition Product Page: http://www.adobe.com/products/audition

The Audition team has been hard at work on upcoming Adobe Audition CS6 and we’re very happy to give you an early, first look!

We give you a glimpse at a couple of great new & improved features:

• Automatic Speech Alignment:  Designed to align overdub dialogue quickly with existing production audio, the new automatic speech alignment feature does much more than merely align initial transients. When used on overdubbed dialogue, Adobe Audition analyzes the frequency spectrum involved as well as the waveforms, so each word of a dialogue clip is matched to its counterpart in the production audio—the real power is a new algorithm to provide alignment of noisy location audio to reduce mis-alignment. If you have ever worked with ADR or overdubbing, you know that this is a time consuming task and our goal was to provide a powerful tool to help make it a little easier. There’s no replacement for the skill and craft involved in professional ADR, but if you have an overdub performance which matches the location audio’s wording and phrasing, but the timing is off for lip sync, the new automatic speech alignment can help. Where you might normally perform a “stretch” on the audio to fit the timing, or be forced to do lots of editing/compositing to line up each word or phrase, automatic speech alignment can help you get good results quickly.

• Clip Grouping:  Yes, it’s back and better than ever. Group contiguous or discontiguous clips in a single track, or across multiple tracks in the Multitrack Editor. Grouping is as easy as selecting all the clips you want; clips in the new group take on a new group color which is configurable in the properties panel. Of course, all of the shortcuts keys for grouping are back just as they were before. Perform a variety of operations on the clips in the group at one time. Easily suspend groupings to make edits to individual groups, and then quickly reapply the grouping without having to remember which clips were in the group, a very powerful editing feature. Also, easily remove or add clips without being forced ungroup and re-group operations. The new & improved clip grouping is more powerful than ever before.

Head to AdobeTV to get a first look at Adobe Audition CS6, automatic speech alignment and clip grouping: http://adobe.ly/H1hDCa

Thanks and see you soon!

The Spectral Frequency Display in Adobe Audition is beautiful to look at, to be sure. But it gives you insight into your audio clips that a waveform view can’t match. For example, in the Spectral Frequency Display, you can see individual harmonics and overtones, and their relative strength. You can see noise. Best of all, you can edit what you see using graphic editing tools with which you’re probably already familiar, and make edits to your audio with near-surgical precision.
If you’re dazzled by brilliant colors, you might miss some of the more useful tools offered by the Spectral Frequency Display. While in the Waveform Editor, let’s take a look at several different types of sound in the Spectral Frequency Display. Frequencies are displayed from low at the bottom to high at the top, and in all cases, the yellower the color, the louder the sound.

Example 1. Here are seven different sounds, as seen in the Spectral Frequency Display. The frequencies along the vertical ruler on the right are in linear mode. It seems that most of the loud frequencies are very small, down at the bottom, and probably difficult to edit. Click on the screen shot for a larger view of it.

If you wanted to zoom in on those lower frequencies in order to edit them, you certainly could. But there’s a more powerful tool available to help you with this. Option-click (Mac) or right-click (PC) in the vertical ruler on the right, and the following menu appears. From this menu you can configure the vertical scale of frequencies from all linear to all logarithmic, which will make the lower frequencies much more visible. You can also adjust the resolution, to make the Spectral Display more precise.

Example 2. Option-click or right-click in the vertical ruler to bring up this menu. Settings such as More Logarithmic and Full Logarithmic will make the lower frequencies more easily visible. Increasing Spectral Resolution makes individual harmonics within a sound easier to see.

The following screen shot shows the exact same audio file as in Example 1, but with Full Logarithmic selected as the scale in the vertical ruler. Note the huge difference in the appearance of the loudest sounds, which for the most part includes the fundamental pitch of an instrument or voice, or the main element in noise. Much more information about these particular sounds is revealed when the scale is logarithmic: You can see the individual notes of the bass in the power trio, the dialogue, and the tuba. You can see the Doppler effect of a passing jet in the airport taxiway. In all cases, you can clearly see frequencies even below the fundamentals.

Example 3. This is the same audio clip as in Example 1, with frequency set to logarithmic scale. The individual notes and harmonics are much more visible. It's as if the audio clip has just given up all its secrets! Click to view a larger version.

With the logarithmic setting, most of the sounds that concern audio editors stand out in relief: fundamentals, overtones, and even noise. The Marquee Selection tool, Lasso Selection tool, Paintbrush Selection tool, and Spot Healing Brush tool are very easy to use and are uniformly effective with all of these sonic elements. But there are a couple of other tools that come up in a contextual menu when you option-click or right-click on the Spectral view itself, such as Capture Noise Print (the first step to automatically removing noise from a clip) and Auto Heal Selection (dramatically reduces a particular sound or noise without eliminating the surrounding background ambience).

Example 4. Option-click or right-click in the Spectral Display iteslf, and this menu appears. Click for a larger view.

The copy command works just as you’d think, letting you make a copy of any area you can select. What do you do with copies of audio data? Do some sound design by pasting part of one sound into another, for one thing. In the following screen shot, we copied the approaching police siren on the left (the oscillating pitch of which is highly), and then pasted it onto the dialogue clip. The result: A dialogue with a passing siren, but without the whoosh of the tires and body noise.

Example 5. Copy and paste in the Spectral Frequency Display works just as it does in any image editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop. But in this case, it takes only the frequencies that you select, and blends the associated sounds as well as the images upon pasting. Here we've copied the sound of an approaching police siren on the left, and pasted it onto the dialogue clip on the right.

You can make even more precise selections with the Lasso Selection or Paintbrush Selection tools. In the following screen shot we use the Lasso Selection tool to select and delete the annoying squeak of a shutting door without disturbing the shutting sound. The result: a door that shuts without squeaking.

To learn more about the power of the Spectral Frequency Display, watch Jason Levine’s excellent video demo by clicking on this link.

Last week, Colin Smith presented a demonstration of some common workflows and tasks in Adobe Audition CS5.5.

You can view the recording here.

(Note: If the Adobe Connect session loses audio/video synch, just click the playhead in Adobe Connect, and it will re-synchronize.)

Here’s an overview of what Colin discussed, along with links to more information about the topics.

• Audition for Soundbooth users
• Customizing the workspace
• Using the mouse wheel to zoom tracks 
• Restoring clipped peaks with DeClipper 
• Adjusting volume with HUD 
• Working with Spectral Display
• Noise reduction
• Advanced settings
• Match Volume 
• Speech volume leveler 
• Match volume across multiple files 
• Exporting stems
• Mixdown to new file
• Amplitude Statistics 
• Effects rack
• Audio plugin manager 
• Pre-render track 
• Audio channel mapping 
• Track EQ 
• Fade In/Out and keyframing
• Interactive fade curves 
• Keyframing and envelopes 
• Busses 
• Bounce bus to new track 
• 5.1 track panner 
• Working with Audio for Video 
• Resource Central has thousands of sound effects 
• including the often requested reference and DTMF tones
• Convolution Reverb 
• With Premiere Pro
• Edit in Adobe Audition (Sequence)
• Multitrack Export to Premiere Pro

You can submit a feature request here.
How to give feedback about Audition.

What is phase cancellation?

When creating a dialogue comp (short for “composite”), the challenge is to find the clips that express the emotion required by the director, and then work with the audio to fit it within the rest of the production. Location audio often offers technical challenges of its own that can threaten the usefulness of the recording. One of the the must difficult to diagnose and solve—at least, for those new to editing audio for picture—is phase cancellation.

A common symptom of phase problems is that your track sounds hollow or quieter when you combine two or more clips. Sometimes this only requires adjusting the volume of each clip to get the best sound. But other times, a track can sound quieter or hollow even when the individual clips are boosted. If this is the case, it can mean the clips are out of phase with each other. Audition CS5.5 can solve this problem easily.

The phase of an audio signal is its particular positive and negative waveform pattern. In A at the top of the illustration at left, two clips of the same waveform are synchronized (as shown by the red X), and their positive and negative pattern is the same, or in phase. This phrase will sound full. In B, the two clips are not synchronized. They’re not off by much, just half a wavelength, which can happen when a source is recorded with two devices or mics—a very common situation with production audio. The positive and negative pattern is the opposite in each clip or out of phase, possibly cancelling each other out, resulting in a quieter or hollow sound. In C, the clips are still not perfectly in sync, but the phase of the clip in Track 2 has been inverted, restoring the in-phase relationship of the waveforms.

Now let’s take a look at how to solve phase problems using Adobe Audition CS5.5.

Try it: Invert the phase of problematic audio

Three dialogue clips of the same source, but with a volume problem.

1. Above is a multitrack session with three tracks, each track contains dialog recorded on a different system: on-camera, a second-system digital recorder, and recording from a clip-on lavalier on the talent. The problem: a hollow sound when mixing the three source files.
2. Using the Zoom panel tools and the Resizing tool, zoom in on the first clips in tracks. Solo the three tracks by clicking on the Solo button in each track header (illustration).
3. Play the clips; the sound of the actor’s voice is hollow and quiet.
4. Select the bottom clip, then we bring up the volume on the clip by dragging the Volume Keyframe up until we get a value of +0.0dB or so (illustration).
5. Play the section; the sound is hollower than it was before. Changing the volume did not work in this case, so it’s probably a phase problem.
6. Double-click on the bottom clip to open it in the Waveform Edit window.
7. Choose Effects > Invert.
8. Click on the Multitrack icon to return to the Multitrack Editor and play the section again. The sound should now be full, and you can adjust the mix between the clips until you get what the production requires.

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.

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.

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.