Adobe Audition Purpose



In my experience, there are two statements known to cause riots: the first is categorically state what’s the best non-linear editor, and, second, is to discuss setting audio levels.

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Since things are a bit quiet at the moment, let’s boldly sally forth into a discussion of audio levels.

NOTE: I am always happy to learn from readers and correct my mistakes. Feel free to share your comments below. However, name-calling is not allowed.

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With the demise of Soundtrack Pro, I am very impressed with the new version of Adobe Audition CS6. I have always loved working with audio, and this program has a lot of nice features that I appreciate a great deal. So, this article shows how to use an effects filter in Adobe Audition CS6 to set levels dynamically.

THE CHALLENGE

For this tutorial, let us assume we have a variety of on-location recordings where we want to retain background and environmental sound. However, like most productions, the talent was recorded low so as to guarantee that there would be no distortion.

We want to increase the audio gain of the talent, without destroying the background sound.

Adobe Audition Purpose

There are several ways we can do this:

  • Raise the volume of the clip by adjusting the yellow audio gain line
  • Raise the volume of the track by adjusting the track gain
  • Raise the volume of the clip or track by adding volume keyframes

However, in all of these examples, there is no guarantee that we won’t adjust the audio level too much and cause distortion. Also, it is either impossible or very difficult to respond to moment-by-moment changes in audio.

What we want to do is increase the softer passages while making sure the louder passages don’t distort.

NOTE: Audition also provides filters that allow you to remove background noise. (Here’s a webinar that explains how these noise filters work.) However the reason we went on location in the first place was to record the sound of the environment along with our talent.

SOME BACKGROUND

Audition allows audio filters to be applied either to the clip or the track. A typical use of a clip filter (which Audition calls “effects.”) might be to remove hum from one clip, without applying that effect to all the other clips in that track.

However, in almost all cases, audio effects are applied to the track.

I first wrote about the Limiter filter when covering Soundtrack Pro. (Read that article here.) A similar filter exists in Audition – called the Hard Limiter effect – that should absolutely be part of your regular audio toolkit.

What the Hard Limiter effect does is amplify soft passages more than louder passages and guarantee that the loudest passages of a clip or track stay below the “limit” that you set in the effect. In other words, the Limiter effect makes the overall volume of a clip louder while “guaranteeing” that the audio in that track won’t distort.

TWO EFFECTS TO AVOID

Because Audition has its roots in radio broadcast, several of its filters are designed to improve the levels of audio recorded in a studio. While these filters work, they totally destroy any background sound that’s contained in a clip recorded on location.

These two filters are:

  • Speech Volume Leveler
  • Adaptive Noise Reduction

The problem is that these two filters are often part of the gain presets shipped with Audition. For this reason, I strongly recommend against using any presets to fix audio levels where the background sound is important to the mix.

Presets to avoid include:

  • Clean up and Level Voice Over
  • DeEss and Limit Female Voice Over
  • DeEss and Limit Male Voice Over
  • Radio Announcer Voice
  • Voice Leveler and Noise Gate

These filters are excellent for studio recordings with no noise, but not to be used for mixing location audio.

A NOTE ON LEVELS IN AUDITION

Audition, like Premiere Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and Final Cut Pro, measures audio using peak (or maximum) values. It displays audio levels using a measuring system called “dBFS” – or “decibels Full Scale.”

Because the system displays peaks, rather than average (or RMS) volume, I set my audio levels set using peak values. Many pro audio engineers prefer to work using average levels, which Audition can calculate, but not display.

NOTE: The most important rule for audio is that your audio levels for the entire mix must not, ever, exceed 0 dB during mixdown, export, or when saving the file. It is not unusual for levels to exceed 0 dB during the mix as you are determining your levels, but excessive levels must be adjusted below 0 dB prior to final output.

When measuring audio levels, always assume the meters are correct and your ears are wrong.

WHERE DO YOU PUT THE LIMITER EFFECT?

On small projects, say less than 10 tracks, you can apply the Limiter effect directly to the track.

However, for larger projects, to conserve CPU cycles, the Limiter effect is often applied to a sub-mix, where all the dialog tracks, for example, are routed to the sub-mix for audio leveling before final output in the mix.

Also, as a general rule, the Limiter filter should not be applied to sound effects, natural background sound, or music. This effect is designed for narration, voice-overs, interview subjects, and all on-camera speech.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Select the track to which you want to apply the filter; this could be a track, submix, or master track. In this example, I’ve selected the track named “Larry;” note the lighter gray color indicating selection.

Click the Effects Rack tab – or select it from Window > Effects Rack – shortcut: Option+0) – to make it active.

Click the Track Effects tab, at the top, to make it active. This applies the effect to the track. (If you wanted to apply the effect to a clip, click the Clip Effects tab to the left.)

From either the Effects menu at the top of the screen, or the right-pointing white arrows to the right of the Effects Rack, select Amplitude and Compression > Hard Limiter.

Two things happen: the Hard Limiter is listed in the Effects Rack and…

Adobe audition manual

The settings for the Limiter are displayed in a floating window on top of your tracks. (Your settings for this filter may look different from mine.)

The specific settings you use can vary, but one that I like is to use Limit to -3dB.

What this does is amplify (Input Boost) the audio gain for the entire clip by 6.0 dB, provided that the maximum level (Maximum Amplitude) never exceeds -3.0 dB.

The only setting you need to adjust is Input Boost. Your goal is to amplify the clip so that it sounds louder, without sounding distorted. The easiest way to adjust this is play your clip and drag the Input Boost slider to adjust the gain. For setting input gain, I like the interface of the Limiter filter in Soundtrack Pro MUCH better as it provided a visual indicator of when the filter was properly adjusted.

So here’s an easy way to set this using Audition.

Audition By Adobe

Click the green power button in the Effects Rack so it goes gray, this turns the filter off without deleting it.

Right-click in the audio meters and set peaks to Static Peaks. This shows you the loudest your peaks are without resetting the peak indicator every few seconds.

Play a representative portion of your clip and watch where the static peaks max out. Since this is a peak, most of your levels will be softer than this. Enter this number into the Input boost.

For example, in this screen shot, my maximum peak is -7 dB. So, I would enter 7 dB into the Input Boost. This gets the effect close to the level I need. At which point, I play the sequence and tweak slightly until my levels sound good. The Maximum Amplitude setting limits the total volume so that it does not get louder than -3 dB.

THE LAW OF THE PAN

This technique works great for mono clips in a mono mix, or stereo clips in a stereo mix. However, there’s a bit of a hitch when setting levels for a mono clip that’s part of a stereo mix. And that’s because when a mono clip is panned into a stereo clip, it’s gain is reduced by 3 dB. Here’s a blog post on Adobe’s website that explains this:

So, the process is the same, but the levels of your clip won’t exceed -6 dB. Weird but true.

SUMMARY

If you are looking to level out the audio gain of a track, without running the risk of distortion, the Hard Limiter is a great choice. The reason I prefer the Hard Limiter effect versus a compressor, is that the Limiter is easier to set up, and provides better control over limiting the maximum volume of a clip.

NOTE: Recently, I created an entire series of video training covering Adobe Audition. This tutorial is an excerpt from that training.

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Whatever your content, Adobe Audition helps you bring stories to life with sound. 2018 marked the 25th anniversary of Adobe Audition, an app that practically defined the concept of the digital audio workstation (DAW) when it started out as Syntrillium Cool Edit Pro, and the team who built it, were acquired by Adobe in 2003. Rebranded as Adobe Audition, the main focus of development shifted to video workflows. Today Audition offers the tightest nonlinear editing (NLE) integration available with its sibling Premiere Pro. But that’s not all it can do.

What makes Audition stand out?

Whatever kind of storytelling you do, no other audio application offers all of the tools that Audition does in one package: multitrack mixing, audio effects, audio waveform editing, a Spectral Frequency editor, and AI-based automation with Adobe Sensei. Instead of switching between applications for different tasks, or buying expensive plugins to add missing functionality, Audition users have everything they need for working with audio right from the get-go. And if there’s something specific you really want or need, you can also use third-party plugins with Audition.

This comprehensive feature set makes Audition a great choice for a wide range of audio production work, like video, radio, podcasting, sound design, audio restoration, music recording, and more.

Let’s take a look at Audition and some of the people who use it.

Adobe Audition in video production

Deep integration with Premiere Pro means Audition is the best app available for connected video production workflows. Sharing the same underlying audio and effects platform means that audio content and metadata move between Audition and Premiere Pro with full fidelity.

Video source: Christine Steele, filmmaker.

Audition tools to support audio workflows in video production include Automatic Speech Alignment, Remix, Auto-Ducking, full support for video formats, and more.

Remix analyzes and rearranges music to fit the duration of your video without manual editing or complicated cross-fading to get the parts of the song you want, thanks to advanced Adobe Sensei machine-learning technology. Automatic Speech Alignment lets you warp and stretch ADR recordings to precisely match on-camera performance with sample accurate lip sync so you can fix dialog easily and turn around projects faster.

Auto-Ducking automatically adjusts soundtrack music around dialog and sound effects to quickly achieve a professional quality mix. Adobe Sensei machine-learning technology scans audio tracks and applies keyframed volume envelopes to normalize audio for clips or projects.

Dual display full-screen video gives you a full-screen display of video content on a secondary monitor while you edit the audio. This is great for editing Foley and sound effects in videos, recording Automatic Dialog Replacement (ADR) or voiceovers.

Podcasting with Adobe Audition

With the growth of podcasting, and the advent of smart speakers, the market for audio content is expanding rapidly. Audition is the perfect place to assemble, polish, and mix stories for these platforms.

Video source: Emma Houlton, podcast creator.

Adobe Audition Vs

Multitrack mixing provides a timeline-based workspace for crafting audio stories. Emma also mentions effects for improving the sound of voices, overall audio quality, and making clips from different sources sound better together.

There’s a really fast way to apply effects through the Essential Sound panel, which gives you easy access to advanced audio engineering with simple slider adjustments for dialog, music, sound effects, and ambience.

Clean-up tools like the Click/Pop Eliminator and DeClicker effects let you remove microphone pops, clicks, light hiss, and crackle.

Audition also supports image files so you can store JPEGs of your artwork with your project metadata. This also gives you a visual reference when searching through archived projects.

Adobe Audition for radio

Adobe Audition has long been a staple for radio production with integrated support for radio-specific metadata and markers, and most radio automation and scheduling services.

Video source: Matt Ogaz, production engineer at KEXP.

Matt uses Audition for cleaning up dialog, multitrack mixing, and the Spectral Display editor for noise reduction. Other tools that radio broadcasters use include Automatic Loudness correction, which lets you match loudness in audio clips so that your content meets broadcast loudness standards.

Audition works with most radio automation and playback systems thanks to support for CART metadata. Timed recordings let broadcasters schedule recordings in advance for automatic capture or timed durations for recordings.

Sound design with Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition comes packed with effects, sound manipulation and repair tools — everything you need for creating and refining sound elements. The multitrack mixer lets sound designers complete their sonic compositions with absolute precision.

Video source: Frank Serafine, Hollywood sound designer.

Along with the mixing and restoration tools that Frank mentions, Audition has a whole bunch of sound design tools, including sound generators and a center channel extractor. The Pitch Bender effect changes tempo over time to vary the pitch. Pitch Shifter is a real-time effect that adjusts the musical pitch of a tone and can be combined with other tools in the effects rack.

Custom channelization lets you design your own channel configurations for any audio mix to shape specific sonic environments for video games, installations, or cinema. With Synthesized speech you can type or paste-in text to generate a voiceover or narration track. Use the Frequency Band Splitter to generate copies of an audio clip, each with a different frequency range. The crossover frequencies determine the split points and you can then edit or apply effects to each band separately.

Audio restoration and Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition originally introduced the concept of Spectral Frequency Editing, which transforms audio restoration into a kind of visual image editing. Together with industrial-strength noise reduction, sound removal, and effects, Audition is a perfect workspace for audio restoration and sound archive work.

Video source: Jason Levine, Adobe evangelist and audio nerd.

Spectral Frequency Editing lets you visualize sound and zoom in on the details for incredibly precise audio editing using familiar Photoshop tools like lasso, marquee selections, and opacity-based paintbrush. Find and remove unwanted sounds and repair or refine audio clips. With Auto Healing, you can paint away clicks, pops, RF hits, mouth sounds, mobile phone rings, and more without affecting other elements in the same audio clip. The Audition Auto-Healing tool provides content-aware super powers for fast audio spot repairs.

The Sound Remover effect removes unwanted audio sources from a recording. This effect uses source separation to analyze a selected portion of the recording and build a sound model, which is used to find and remove the sound.

Manual and automatic pitch controls allow you to visually adjust pitch with the Spectral Pitch Display in both the Waveform and Multitrack editors.

Adobe Audition Beginners Guide

Music recording with Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition Purposeful

Born as Cool Edit Pro, one of the first digital audio workstation applications, Adobe Audition is still one of the best tools anywhere for capturing, mixing, and mastering musical performances.

Video source: Jason Levine, Adobe evangelist and recording artist.

Control surface support and parameter automation lets you mix audio interactively with control surfaces using the Avid EUCON, Mackie MCU and HUI, or Logic Control protocols — or use third-party, tablet-based controllers that support these protocols.

Audition offers music-focused tools, such as guitar suite effect, a variety of detailed reverb controls, and support for VST audio plugins, as well as Audio Units on macOS.

That’s just a taste of what Audition can do. Think of Audition as a soundstage for storytelling, an Adobe design app for audio with all of the tools you need for telling stories with audio of any kind.

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Watch Jason Levine’s livestreams “Five Things Every Video Editor Should Know about Adobe Audition.”

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