Why is there no downloadable offline PDF User Guide for Adobe AudtionCC?

[richardcN2212A]

Why is there no downloadable offline PDF User Guide for Adobe AudtionCC? All I can find is the useless, unsearchable web version that takes two hours to find a 15 second answer.

[John Waller]

Adobe stopped issuing PDF User Guides a few years ago. They're expensive to produce and cannot easily be updated. The most recent PDF I have found online is dated Nov 2019.

Adobe has offered unsatisfactory web-based help for several years now. I too find the web-based user help hard to use and navigate. I usually use online video courses or 3rd party training materials. I find answers to specific questions in seconds by googling.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Further to what John has said - most of the common (and quite a lot of the uncommon) questions have been asked in this forum. So when it comes to Audition specifically, it's worth using the forum search initially. Results from general sources can be pretty mixed. And if you're really stuck it's worth asking here anyway; we aim to answer most things reasonably promptly. The main problem with just reading something is that you are still left asking yourself whether it's actually the best answer to your particular issue...

As far as user guides go - well to be frank, they've only really been function guides anyway, not proper 'user' guides. And there's a reason for this, going back to Cool Edit Pro and Syntrillium, where Audition spent its childhood. It's quite simple; most of the things people want to achieve can be done in more than one way, and there's not necessarily just one 'correct' way to get the results you're after. So a 'how to' manual is going to be really hard to create on that basis. And that's basically why the forum exists in the way it does - it's much easier to help people select from various possibilities when you know a little more about what they are trying to achieve.

But on the other hand, we know that people really only want results, and that Audition, being pretty 'deep', if you like, isn't always that transparent, and I get entirely that people want to short-cut as much of this as possible. I really don't know how Adobe is supposed to achieve that, other than by what it's doing now - which I will freely admit isn't fully satisfactory. As far as I'm aware, a lot of the foregoing applies to Premiere as well. But despite all that, it's probably the case that asking on the forum about specific problems is still the least worst way of getting an answer - and often an explanation as well. One way that Adobe hasn't actually helped was by getting rid of the stand-alone FAQ section - I wish we could have that back.

I've never written a book about Audition, but I have edited one of the past published attempts. And I realised, just from doing this, how much the author had left out (no names, no pack drill - the author doesn't know who edited it!) and actually got wrong. Proper user guides are not only expensive, but really difficult to create.