I have been an avid fan on Audition, even before it was Audition. In a previous life, this program was called Cool Edit Pro. Recently, I reviewed a copy of SoundBooth, so naturally I wanted to see what its “big brother” has to offer.
First of all, let’s take a look at the comparison of the two programs from Adobe’s website:
| |
Adobe Soundbooth |
Adobe Audition |
| What it is |
Audio application with a task-based interface for everyday audio needs |
All-in-one toolset for professional audio production |
| Designed for |
Video editors, designers and developers who work with Flash, motion graphics artists, and other creative professionals without a background in audio |
Audio-centric professionals such as sound designers, recording and mastering engineers, and musicians. |
| Key features |
• Single-asset editing with on-clip controls
• Task-based toolset
• AutoComposer for quickly customizing Soundbooth Scores
• Cue point support for Flash
• Resource Central for Soundbooth Scores, sound effects, and more |
• Low-latency multitrack mixing
• Tools-based interface
• Music looping with thousands of included loops
• Audio CD burning and extraction
• Recordable parameter automation
• Batch processing and scripting |
| Video product integration |
Edit Original and Edit in Adobe Soundbooth functionality |
Edit Original and Edit in Adobe Audition functionality |
| Operating system |
Intel® based Mac with Mac OS X v.10.4.9 Windows® XP or Windows Vista™ |
Windows XP |
| Availability |
Standalone and included in Adobe Creative Suite® 3 Production Premium or Master Collection software |
Standalone |
So basically, if you are a Flash or web design person, you would want to purchase Soundbooth. If you are an audiophile, you would want to purchase Audition.
Note that there is a price difference between the two. Soundbooth comes in at $199, while to get the full monty with Audition, you’ll be paying around $349.
Adobe Audition 2.0 has several new features and tools. I’ll attempt to identify a few of them below:
• Audition 2.0 now sports a brand new interface which is even easier to use.
• Supports up to 96 inputs and outputs
• Integrates easily with the other pieces of the Creative Suite
• Offers a Workspace feature (like Photoshop), where you can choose your workspace to support different tasks
• Frequency Space Editing is a new feature in Audition 2.0. You can specifically apply any effect to a specific time and frequency range you selected
• The problem with latency in former versions has been greatly reduced
• Audio “scrubbing” is now available to provide help for in-depth editing
• An improved and sophisticated frequency-space editing tool is now available
• The Edit Window now comes with four different views: Waveform, Spectral Frequency, Spectral Pan and Spectral Phase display
• Pitch correction methods are improved
• Multiband compressor is a new tool
• New and improved Adobe Help Center for Audition 2.0
• VST and DirectX plug-ins are available. The Mastering Rack lets you apply effect-chains of up to 16 different VST or DirectX effects
• If you’re into video, Audition has looped punching which helps in ADR production
Adobe has stepped up and produced a great studio production tool that actually does what it says it can do. You can record, mix and master with ease in the latest version of Audition.
As always, Adobe includes a ton of loops to go with the software. This is great when you need to custom mix your own sound, but don’t have the music.
All in all, Audition 2.0 is the one-stop production shop for any type of audio editing. This is why I give it a rating of 5 of 5 stars.
Testing Equipment: Computer: PC with a 2Gb Athlon chip RAM: 1 GB
