Audition CS 5.5 and the future of Audition

Dear Durin,

Thank you for taking your time to post here about the new release, provide screen shot and explainations of what is new and how they work.

I am what many would call a relative new comer to Audition, using for about 2 1/2 years. My original intent was for use as my 1 and only DAW in my home project studio.  However over the past 18 months I have developed a small clientele for whom I do voice overs and original music beds. (Nice to get paid for a hobby that I love.) During this time I have found my needs to have grown beyond what 3.01 and now 5.5 can do.

I had hoped that this upgrade(?), would have included some features that would have made my workflow and music creation within Audition even better/easier then it already is. I am disappointed to find out that midi implementation has been dropped completely at this time.  The removal of the ability to group clips is also very problematic. I have not heard if there is now a multitrack overlay grid that can be set to divisions of the projects BMP and turned on and off, with snapping and nudging enabled to this grid. I was hopeful that time signature markers, for mutliple time signatures within a project would be included. I had hoped that when previewing clips/files within Audition you would be able to preview at project tempo.

These are a few of the thing I had hoped to see, or are dissappointed they have been removed. I know, I will probably get jumped on by SteveG because, "it  was never meant to be music creation tool." Maybe not, but programs do evolve beyond original intent.

I intend to give the trial a whirl. But to be honest, I have already moved on to another DAW to make up for that which is lacking in 3.01 and has been left out of CS5.5.  I am lookng forward to future releases in hopes I can come back and have my needs met.

Duff

Thanks for the feedback so far.  I'll put any suggestions into our feature database as they come in.  I figured I'd show off a few screenshots of UI improvements, new features, and the like.  Let me know if you'd like any information on specific tools and I'll be happy to elaborate.  Several members of the team are hoping to post some tutorials or video tutorials in time for release, so any suggestions for that would be most welcome.

Amplitude Statistics

This panel has always been modal meaning while it's visible, you have not been able to interact with the application, make new selections to scan, or continue editing.  With Audition CS 5.5, this tool behaves like most every other panel and can be docked or moved to another monitor or area of your desktop so you can have access as-needed.  Functionally, the tool has been improved to address some minor bugs and accuracy issues uncovered in Audition 3, and several new stats have been included such as Dynamic Range and Loudness levels.

Batch Processing

Batch Processing has been re-written as a dockable, standard panel as well and files can be dragged directly from the Files panel, from your OS File Browser, or from a standard OS Open File dialog available within the panel.  Stats about the file are displayed and the contents can be sorted as desired.

Opening the process parameter dialog presents all options in a single panel rather than the 5 tabbed menu format from Audition 3.  Here, you can apply a recorded favorite to all files, adjust filenames with a prefix and postfix, choose format conversion settings, and a few additional cleanup options.  As the files are processed - in the background as with almost all operations, delegating the tasks across available processors - you'll see the progress indicators next to each file giving you quick, visual feedback on the status and remaining time to complete the operation.

Diagnostics Panel

Many of our restoration and diagnostic tools are now located in their own dockable panel including the DeClicker, DeClipper, Delete Silence, and Mark Audio tools.  While sensible defaults are selected for each tool, you may adjust the sensitivity parameters by clicking the "Settings" button.  After scanning the active file, all identified items (clicks, regions of silence, etc..) are displayed and can be brought into view and selected by a single-click on the entry row.  Repair one at a time or all at once. 

So what's new with Audition CS 5.5?

The biggest item to note, obviously, is that Audition is now available for Windows and Apple OS X systems with feature parity on each platform.  (The only major difference between the two is support for Apple AudioUnit effects on OS X, in addition to VST support on both platforms.)

The audio engine has been re-written to take advantage of multicore CPUs and multithreading.  Our goal was to provide performance that was better than Audition 3 on all supported platforms.  Audition CS 5.5 runs great on the lowliest netbook, and unbelievably fast on the latest 12- and 16-core systems.  Almost every operation runs in the background, so when you're rendering a hardcore time stretch or performing a session mixdown, you can continue working on other files or sessions.  (Apologies to smokers who won't be able to justify taking frequent breaks anymore - at least not because of Audition.)  OS X supports Core Audio, so  you can use any supported hardware, or create your own Aggregate Devices if you need to mix-and-match hardware.  Windows continues to support ASIO with a new engine, and offers MME support as well.

All of our effects are channel-agnostic where applicable, so mono, stereo, 5.1, 7.1, 10.2, 82-channel, whatever you got.  They're all multithreaded as well, so they apply and process so nicely.  We've broken out the Audition and iZotope Radius time-stretch algorithms so you can choose which one to use.  (Auditions is faster and allows for gliding stretch, but may be prone to more artifacts, while iZotope's sounds beautiful but takes a heavy toll on your processor and patience.)  Many of the Diagnostic/Restoration tools are available as stand-alone effects or from within our Diagnostic panel which allows you to scan, preview, and repair transients with a lot more control than in the past.  Almost all effects and effects rack (including Edit View) are non-modal which means you can stack your effects, preview, adjust, and continue editing without committing your effects destructively until you're ready to do so.

The waveform editor adopted the best productivity aspects of both Audition and Soundbooth, offering the split-screen waveform/spectral view, on-screen fade handles and HUD amplitude control.  The "NavBar" view along the top of the editor panel shows you your entire waveform along with the current viewing range, selections, etc.  Restoration tools such as the healing brush have been improved, and all edits are recorded in a History panel so you can quickly jump back or forward in your edit history.  The Level metering has been improved and updates faster with new display options.  File and session properties are displayed in a dedicated panel with appropriate option parameters available for quick adjustments. 

The multitrack environment now allows you to specify your Master channelization in Mono, Stereo, or 5.1 modes, with additional options for bit depth and sample rate.  Effects can be added to tracks or clips with automation envelope control for both.  Automatic crossfades with new options, on-clip fade handles and volume and pan automation, and improved support for razor edits and slip editing.  Native 5.1 surround support with 5.1 panner integrated into the track controls with new Surround Reverb effects offer a lot of power for surround mixes.  The back-end player engine will make it almost trivial for Audition to support other surround formats in the future.  Background rendering has returned merged with Audition 3's Track Freeze functionality, so you can "freeze" a track, but continue modifying it without any other tinkering.  If you want to run resource-intensive effects, just flip the switch to quietly render these in the background and take more control of where your system resources are spent.

For Premiere Pro users, you can send one or more clips to Audition for editing, or share an entire sequence.  Premiere will create an interchange file with reference video and clips with arbitrary handle durations which can be opened on the same system or shared with another person for audio editing, mixing, mastering, or ADR.  Once the mix is complete, you can send the session back to Premiere in one of several ways: separate stems for each audio track, for each bus, or a complete mixdown in mono, stereo, and 5.1.  These final clips are inserted back into the Premiere sequence and remain tied to the original Audition session for additional edits.

In addition to native Premiere interchange support, Audition also imports and exports OMF and Final Cut XML sequences, so you can use Audition in conjunction with just about any other tool in your workflow.  Our OMF support is among the best I've used, and has handled some insanely complicated timelines with speed and grace.

New features include improved Batch Processing tools, Volume Matching (to a variety of profiles) of multiple files, multitrack Phase Metering, and recordable Favorites which can be applied individually or as a Batch Process.  Automatic session saving and an improved Crash Recovery system helps prevent loss of work in the (hopefully unlikely) event of a crash.  Effects and plug-in scanning is improved and makes it easier to blacklist troublesome effects or see what might be causing troubles.

So what's missing in Audition CS 5.5?

Let me start by addressing the comments that features were "removed" from Audition.  Nothing has been officially deleted from the Audition feature list, but there is a lot that was in Audition 3.01 that has not been updated and ported to the new codebase.  In some cases, a feature did not make it into CS 5.5 because it fell too low on the priority list, others could not be developed to our level of expectations within the timeframe we had or without negatively impacting other features that were deemed more important for this release.  When facing some of these difficult decisions, we had to assess whether the feature fell into the toolkit of the video and radio broadcast workflow that we needed to support immediately.  In certain cases, we had to determine if it was feasible to ask users to rely upon functionality built into their OS.  Finally, we refused to compromise on many of our favorite features and if we did not feel we could build the best implementation of a tool, it was often a better decision to focus our resources and efforts where they would do the most good.  We continue to re-prioritize our feature backlog on a weekly basis as we move onto developing Audition CS 6, and many of the initial feature work was determined by our pre-release users and the features they most missed with CS 5.5.

Some effects have not been ported at this time including Tone and Noise generation, Pitch correction (although Pitch Shifting is available through the Time and Pitch stretch tool,) Scientific filters, and Graphic Phase Shifter.  There are some new effects including a DeHummer, Surround Reverb, and Speech Volume Leveler.  We also continue to offer updates to several iZotope effects including the Tube-modeled and Multiband Compressors.

MIDI functionality has not been addressed with this release.  At this time we have not implemented MIDI-based hardware control, playback, or virtual instrument sequencing.  I don't think anyone on the team was satisfied with the VSTi composition environment offered in Audition 3, nor with the implementation necessary to integrate it with the multitrack environment, and I hope that if it returns in the future, that we can offer a robust, integrated solution that can stand toe-to-toe with other sequencers.  Controller support is probably the bigger loss with this release, but I believe what we've got planned for the future will make almost everyone very happy.

Another big loss is legacy session support.  One explanation for its absence was the difficulty in interpreting a one-to-one translation with Auditions new multitrack, effects, and uncompleted features.  Audition CS 5.5 will import as much as is applicable from an Audition 3.0 XML session, but big kudos need to go out to the forums own SuiteSpot, creator of AATranslator among other Audition-related applications, who has been working on a legacy session batch conversion tool which should release around the same time as Audition CS 5.5.  He has gone far and above the call of duty and is crafting an amazing solution.  I hope we are able to offer a comprehensive SDK in the future to allow our users to write their own tools and enhancements, customizing Audition to their personal needs.

As has been discussed in other threads, Audition CS 5.5 does not include the ability to burn audio CDs from within the application.

I sincerely believe that Audition CS 5.5 is an amazing application and with all due respect to the features that are missing when compared with previous versions, that this is possibly one of our strongest releases in speed and performance.  I hope that everyone will at least give the 30-day trial a chance when it is available for download in about a month.  The upgrade pricing is still $99 from any previous version of Audition, and for suite users, it's addition in the Production Premium suite should be very exciting.  If you find you are not able to use Audition CS 5.5 in your workflow, I hope that you'll let us know specifically what missing tools are most important to you as well as how the Audition 3 implementation might be updated to better suit your needs.  While I would love everyone to update - Audition CS 5.5 installs seamlessly alongside previous versions on the same computer - I understand that this release may not meet everyones expectations, and I hope you'll remain open to Audition CS 6 and continue to be an important member of the Audition community here and in other forums.

I met with several of you at NAB this week, and have a notebook full of requests and comments.  Everyone I spoke to was energized about this release and even the most skeptical visitors were impressed when they sat through a demonstration or had a chance to use it.  The stage demonstrations of Audition always filled every seat in our theater, overflowed into the surrounding aisles, and often spilled into neighboring booths!  It was excellent to hear the responses and get feedback from so many people about this tool we've been working on so hard for the last two years.  Keep the comments and suggestions coming so that we can create the best application for our awesome users.

Thanks!

Durin