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Participant
September 26, 2019
Question

Audition AAF Import

  • September 26, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 24236 views

I'm experimenting with Audition for the first time. How do I import an AAF file?

3 replies

Participant
June 15, 2025

it is shocking and sad to discover Audition can't open an AAF. This lack of a fundamental feature makes it just a toy for children and nothing close to being a professional tool.  Why do they even bother to build something like this and hobble it like this.

SuiteSpot
Inspiring
June 15, 2025

AAF is a joke that AVID played on the Audio community and they are the only ones laughing.
I've been interrogating and converting AAFs since the late 1990s and I still come across rougue AAF variants.
A simple google search will show you just how many daws can't open AAFs from other daws and even if they do either one of them won't fully support the details contained within (if they even contain them at all).
If Adobe was to even try and meaningfully support AAF they will not only be digging a whole and throwing all their development funds down it but they will then find that the posts on this forum will be filled with the complaints of unsuspecting fools screaming about all the things they haven't covered or that don't work.
There are just so many better and more effective formats than AVID's in-house garbage.
But hey, everyone is entitled to their opinion

 

SuiteSpot
Inspiring
September 27, 2019

It must be late at night or I'm going mad but send me the AAF and I will convert it to Audition for you
info@aatranslator.com.au

Participant
September 27, 2019
Thanks for the offer. It seems like you must be using some other program to import the AAF ?
SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 27, 2019

My understanding is that AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) files are essentially about the exchange of metadata. Audition is an audio editor, and whilst it can handle metadata associated with audio, it's not a general metadata handler. Whether this will change in any material way, I don't know - but at present it has no means of dealing with files in that format.

Participant
September 27, 2019
Thank you for the fast response. I have been working in post audio for many years and can assure you that AAF is the standard format for exchange of edited audio from video editors. If Audition cannot import AAF source audio then it's not useful to me.
SuiteSpot
Inspiring
March 9, 2021

Ugh. 2021 and no AAF support. I mean, geez, OMF and AAF are basically the same. Come on Adobe.


They are two totally different beasts entirely.

They are self proclaimed standards that never should have been created.
Although the container format is always a standard, the methods of describing data within the containers is not.
They each have multiple ways of describing the same thing and since everyone has a slightly different way of doing things within the containers, they might as well not exist at all.
To call it any kind of standard should be against the law.

OMF is literally a format within a container format.
AAF is much worse because it is a format within a container within a structured storage format.

And no there is no such thing as a 'standard' OMF or AAF.  Even Avid have two different variants of both OMF and AAF - the ProTools variant and the Media Composer variant.

From memory even Final Cut X doesn't have AAF (or even OMF).

So no I'm not surprised Audition doesn't have AAF support