Workflow: Finding an organizing clips for a new project

I'm not going to pretend that Audition's documentation, especially when it comes to workflows, is anything special at all - it simply isn't. Some of the online tutorials are a better, but often the bread-and-butter stuff gets overlooked. And that's a bit strange, as it isn't entirely intuitive.

When it comes to editing radio interviews, there's only really one workable procedure - but when you've got used to it, it's remarkably powerful. The basic procedure is to have an empty multi-track session set up (give it a name!), and then open the interview file (or even more than one of them) in Waveform view. Work your way through the file, deciding which bits you want to keep. You do this by highlighting a selection and hitting F8 - this will automatically create a range, which shows up in the marker list, and you can give this cue range an individual name if you want. You can, if you're in a real hurry, right-click on a selection and choose 'insert into multitrack' and select your session, and dump it straight onto your track, but if you want to keep a better track of what you're doing, then going via a marked cue range is better. All of this is 'virtual' though; nothing about your original file gets altered at all.

Now you will have a selection of clips to use, and you can drag them around, crossfade them, extend or shorten them to your heart's content. Do a mixdown to a new file, and you're done. Where this is really powerful is that you can make different arrangements of the same material (versioning), and using Save As, have a different session file for each. Also, if anybody wants just one bit changed, it's very easy to do, as you've still got your original intact - all that's going into the multi-track sessions is playback selections from the original file. It's worth mentioning that it's good practice anyway to make a copy of your original file, and edit from that, if you're at all concerned about it.

You can sum this up really by saying that what you've done is to create an organised playback of different bits of your original file(s), exactly as you want them to be, and saved that as a new file.

HTH...