How can I zoom in vertically anywhere on my temporal signal?

Report · Jun 27, 2023

One powerfull functionnality of Adobe Audition 3.0 was to be able to zoom in anywhere into a temporal signal, we could even decenter the signal to zoom into the highest values of the signal.
Today with Adobe Audtion 23.5.0.48 I am only able to zoom in around the zero axis, thus I can not have a closer look anymore on the peaks of my signal, and this is really annoying.

Is there a trick somewhere to be able to zoom anywhere in the temporal signal?

Report · Jun 27, 2023

No - I'm afraid that you will have to continue to be really annoyed. I think that this feature was dropped with the release of CS5.5 (along with quite a few others). Whilst it might have been nice to look at, it didn't really have any functional value, and as far as I'm aware, yours is the only complaint we've had about it.

Report · Jun 30, 2023

It does a lot!

Zooming into the highest amplitude parts of a signal allows you to study distorsion due to limiters, compressors or clipping, and this kind of distorsion can be way more audible than noise.

I migth be the only one complaining but I am pretty sure I am not the only one annoyed. Again, it was a simple but powerful functionnality for analysing audio signals. That's a pity it doesn't exist anymore

Report · Jun 30, 2023

No, sorry, don't buy that. There is no way that looking at distortion peaks is going to tell you anything at all about how to deal with them, nor where they might have come from. And because distortion cannot be corrected (there's no reference to correct it against), there's nothing that you can do to correct it anyway - with the possible exception of being able to correct minor overshoot errors when they're only a few samples long. And to correct those, you don't need to be able to see the peak overshoots - you just need the software to be able to detect them. So no, there really is no functional value to being able to zoom in to peaks, I'm afraid - which is almost certainly why this 'feature' was dropped.

Report · Jun 30, 2023

It is not all about mastering and mixing. Some people, not you obviously, were using Adobe Audition 3.0 to analyze signals during processing development (signal processing engineers for example) and to do so, being able to zoom anywhere in the signal is mandatory. So please stop being presumptuous. It is not because this feature is not interesting for you that it is useless.

I thank you anyway to have confirmed me that this functionnality is no longer supported.

Report · Jun 30, 2023

Presumptious? I never mentioned mastering and mixing... And I did rather a lot of signal processing analysis whilst doing my Masters, one way or another, and a lot more since. Never found any value in being able to zoom into waveform peaks at all. Zooming into the top of the spectral view, on the other hand, can reveal quite a lot, as can subtracting waterfall graphs from each other - that's a far more revealing technique when it comes to distortion analysis, although it's rather specialised.