Removal of CD Authoring in Adobe Audition

Hi everyone! I really appreciate your thoughts and concerns here. I'll take this back to the team. In the meantime, older versions of Audition will continue to support CD authoring, and if there are any new updates, I'll share them in this thread.

Certainly a disappointing development. We all know that Audition can’t be all things to all people, but it’s hard to understand why it should be diminished like this. Please reconsider!

I want to add another perspective from a workflow where audio CD creation is still a required deliverable, not a legacy preference.

I supervise an audio and video forensics unit in a prosecutor’s office. In our office, Adobe Audition’s CD authoring tools are regularly used to create court exhibits. Courts, attorneys, juries, and law enforcement agencies still rely on physical media in many situations, and we do not always have the option to simply say that “digital delivery is the modern workflow.” In the justice system, the required deliverable is often determined by courtroom equipment, not by what is common in music, podcasting, or streaming production.

The suggested replacement workflow does not adequately cover what Audition currently does. Operating system burning tools are not equivalent CD authoring tools. They commonly reject or mishandle certain file types, provide limited control over track layout, and do not provide the same confidence when preparing a clean, court-ready exhibit. More importantly, Audition has handled sample-rate conversion and preparation for CD audio cleanly. Other tools often do a noticeably poor job when upsampling audio, sometimes adding noise or artifacts that are unacceptable when the audio may be used as evidence.

For forensic and legal exhibit work, that matters. We are not just burning casual listening copies. We need reliable, repeatable, clean output. We need to know that the audio was prepared properly and that the disc will play as expected in court. Removing CD Layout view, CD markers, and CD-frame time display removes functionality that is directly tied to precision and reliability.

I understand that CD delivery may be a smaller percentage of Adobe’s overall customer base, but “smaller” does not mean “unimportant.” Some workflows are specialized but critical. Adobe Audition has long been valuable because it supported professional edge cases that general consumer tools do not handle well. Directing users to basic OS burning tools assumes that all CD creation is simple file-to-disc burning, and that is not accurate.

If Adobe is going to remove built-in CD authoring, then there should at least be a supported professional replacement workflow that preserves the same level of control and audio quality. Otherwise, this is not modernization; it is a loss of a dependable production feature that some customers still need for real-world deliverables.

Please reconsider removing this feature, or provide a proper Adobe-supported alternative for users who still need to create accurate, clean, Red Book-compatible audio CDs from Audition.

This is of course completely unsatisfactory, for several reasons. CD usage isn’t going away; if anything its use is increasing again, at least amongst Gen Z. But not just them - I still use CDs quite extensively for customers who would far rather have something physical in their hands. This still goes for most classical music production - it’s a part of the process towards a final release.

But... Anybody trying to use the built-in CD burning tools in the OS will rapidly realise a couple of things; firstly, that they flatly refuse to burn an MP3 directly. Secondly, that you can’t edit the layout to remove the pauses between tracks. Even if you turn all your files into one big track in advance, you won’t be able to get the track joins lined up correctly any more because somebody has just announced that they’ve also chosen to remove the CD framing options on the timeline, and there’s absolutely no way to do this with the OS. That last one is a major fail.

If CD production ‘represents a small fraction of how customers ship their work’, then why are you taking it away? Especially as the tools to do this clearly aren’t available in the OS, despite your claim. As for the ‘software burden’, I don’t buy that argument either. You appear to be quite happy to add all sorts of features to other software without removing parts of it, yet you’ve added nothing substantial to Audition for a long time, despite all sorts of requests. All you’ve threatened is to remove a useful tool. And since nothing’s changed, then nothing has ‘compounded’, has it? As it is on this machine, Premiere takes up over three times as much space as Audition does, and you should remember that when making claims about surface area, etc.

Even if you’d said that you were going to add some of the features that had been requested, but there would be a price to pay in terms of overall size, that would have been one thing (perhaps..) but no, you haven’t done that at all. It’s just a loss.

If you want to drop Audition completely and just have it integrated into Premiere, then just say so, and get on with it. No new feature additions, and existing facilities cut looks very much like death by a thousand cuts by a company that can easily afford not to.