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Participant
June 5, 2025
Open for Voting

Add Multi-Selection for Audio Regions in All Views (Waveform, Spectral, Multitrack)

  • June 5, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 175 views

I’d like to suggest a powerful time-saving feature for Adobe Audition: the ability to multi-select non-contiguous regions of audio in the Waveform Editor, Spectral View, and Multitrack Editor.

Currently, we can only select and apply edits or effects to one region at a time. This becomes extremely repetitive and inefficient when working with long sessions, like a 1-hour podcast or vocal track where you need to remove breaths, apply silence, or process certain words repeatedly.

The proposed Multi-Selection feature would allow us to:

  • Select multiple regions of the waveform, even from different places in the same clip or across tracks
  • Zoom, scroll, or navigate without interrupting the selection process
  • Apply edits (cut, delete, silence) or batch effects to all selected regions at once
  • Work seamlessly in both Waveform and Spectral views, as well as in the Multitrack Editor

This would save hours of manual repetitive work for editors, podcasters, voice-over artists, and sound designers. It’s a small feature with huge impact, and I believe many users would benefit from it.

Thanks for considering this improvement!

2 replies

Participant
June 6, 2025

Thanks for the detailed explanation — I completely understand now why this isn't a small change. The historical architecture of Waveform view makes perfect sense as a limiting factor.

That said, I’d like to share why this feature would still be incredibly valuable even just in Multitrack for now, and why its eventual support in Waveform view could be transformative for many users:

In Waveform view, we get highly accurate visual feedback — especially when working with breaths or small details in voice recordings. The waveform shapes and especially the Spectral Frequency Display make it easy to identify and isolate things like breaths, mouth clicks, or noise bursts. These aren’t as easily visible in Multitrack, where the waveform display is smaller and lacks the precision of Spectral editing.

If this kind of precise, multi-region editing was available in Multitrack, that would already be a massive time-saver. But if one day the Waveform view could support it — even if it requires moving away from legacy temp file handling — it would truly set Adobe Audition apart from other DAWs and editors. It’s the kind of workflow improvement that could push Audition to a whole new level of usability and efficiency.

I understand it would be a breaking change, but maybe it’s worth considering for the long-term roadmap. A reworked Waveform engine that supports multi-region editing and modern non-linear workflows could unlock massive value for both voice-over artists and post-production teams.

Thanks again for the transparency and all the hard work you and the team put into Audition.

SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 5, 2025

I'm symathetic to this idea, but I have to tell you that it's not a small feature. You have to bear in mind that in Waveform view, edits take place in contiguous chunks that are written to a temp file, and this is how undos are handled - you roll back to the previous temp file version. It's like this for historical reasons, dating back to the previous millenium (really!). I don't think that it would be particularly easy at all to create multi-region temp files, and that is exactly what would be required. What it really requires is a complete rethink of how Waveform view works - and maybe that's what is required. But please don't go away thinking that it's only a small task, or that nobody's thought of it before (they most certainly have), because it isn't, and they have...

 

And that's just on a single Waveform file. Curiously enough, this might be easier to implement in Multitrack, because it doesn't work the same way at all - from this POV session files are rather more amenable, I suspect. Could you live with it just in Multitrack?