Review: Adobe Audition 3.0 (Win)

May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Allan Metts

MORE MIDI, MORE POWER FOR THIS CAPABLE DAW

BONUS MATERIAL
Read more about Adobe Audition 3.0

A Bigger Toolbox

Audition has always provided a powerful suite of effects and other goodies, and I'm happy to report that version 3 expands this arsenal even more. An Automatic Phase Correction tool can help you expel pesky phase problems, and an Adaptive Noise Reduction effect can help clean up your audio. Noise-reduction tools are nothing new to Audition, but this new one works well on dynamic broadband noise where you may not be able to capture a noise print. And unlike the other noise-reduction tools, it's a VST effect that you can use in real time.

Also new are suites of effects for guitars and mastering. The Guitar Suite effect includes stages for compression, filtering, distortion, and amp modeling, while the Mastering effect gives you a parametric equalizer, reverb, an exciter, a stereo widener, a loudness maximizer, and an output gain stage. I was able to achieve reasonable results with both of these, although the Guitar Suite sounded a little too “digital” to my ears (I'm no guitarist, however, so your experience may be different).

Adobe added a convolution reverb with more than a dozen built-in impulses, and you can import your own. There's also an Analog Delay effect and a Tube-Modeled Compressor effect from iZotope.

IZotope's handiwork also appears in the program's time-stretching and pitch-shifting, where the company's Radius algorithm, which includes formant-preservation capabilities, is used to produce a much higher-quality effect than before. You can access this algorithm in the Stretch effect, but it is also used elsewhere in the program when time-stretching or pitch-shifting needs to take place (such as with looped clips in the Multitrack view). I tried this effect on several files, and the results sounded great.

Rounding out the version 3 improvements are clip grouping and automatic crossfades in the Multitrack view, automatic lookup of track information when ripping CDs, and batch processing. Batch processing is particularly welcome. You can apply any number of processes to any number of files, resample the results to a given sampling rate and bit depth, and output the results using the file format and naming scheme you choose.

Audition's documentation is complete and context sensitive and is available in both HTML and PDF formats. You even get a printed user guide — a rarity these days. Once again, Adobe scores big with a solid upgrade to this capable program.

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Allan Metts is an Atlanta-based musician, software/systems designer, and consultant. Check him out at sonicbids.com/allanmetts.

PRODUCT SUMMARY

digital audio workstation
$349

PROS: Clean and intuitive user interface. Comprehensive effects and processing tools. Excellent editing capabilities in the frequency domain. Support for MIDI and VST instruments.

CONS: Limited MIDI support for hardware synths. Simplistic implementation of quantization and other offline MIDI processing.

FEATURES	1	2	3	4	5
EASE OF USE	1	2	3	4	5
DOCUMENTATION	1	2	3	4	5
VALUE	1	2	3	4	5

Adobe Systems Incorporated
adobe.com