Different Audio Levels Going Back and Forth Between Multitrack and Waveform

It depends mainly upon two things, this. Firstly, the settings on the Multitrack mixer panel, and secondly the pan law setting you used when setting up the multitrack session.

If the mixer levels are set so that all tracks at at 0dB, and the pan law was set to L/R cut - Logarithmic, then all the levels will transfer between Multitrack and Waveform views correctly.

But if you created the session with the multitrack pan law set to -3dB center, then the track will appear to be 3dB lower in level in Waveform view. This is because panning is effected by using equal power settings, and compensating the channel levels accordingly. What this means in practice is that the level of each channel has to be reduced in Multitrack view to take account of what happens when the pan control is advanced fully to one side - that's the point where the channel level will appear 'correctly'.

L/R cut - Logarithmic doesn't do that - it achieves panning by reducing the amount of the other channel, and leaving the first one alone.

These settings only make a difference if you are actually panning a mono source across a stereo sound stage. With the -3dB center setting, the sound will remain at the same apparent level right across it, as the apparent increase you'd get in the centre (dB addition) is compensated for. With the L/R cut, the law is somewhat different, and the panning won't be as smooth at all. If you are only placing a signal into a sound field and not moving it, it makes no difference which you use - until you do what you're doing, and jumping between Waveform and Multitrack.

One 'solution' to this that works reasonably well is to use -3dB center for your setting, and advance the master fader to +3dB. The apparent level between the two playbacks should remain the same. But this means that you have to have the channel fader also set to 0dB, otherwise all bets are off as to what you hear.

Incidentally, the information about which law you used is written into the session file, and also you won't be able to get the results from any change you make until you've shut down and restarted Audition. That catches out a few people. I believe it's possible to edit your session file to make it use the other law, but we'd need Suite spot to remind us how to do that, I think...