Feature Request: We should be able to group tracks in Multitrack Editor into collapsible nests

[Siansonea]

How awesome would it be to be able to select five tracks, select Group (or Nest, or Create Subsequence or whatever), and have those five tracks take up only one track of space in your Multitrack session? Yes, you can currently send all those tracks to a bus for processing as a group, but my sessions with a lot of tracks become a ridiculously long scroll, and that's a time waster for me. You can't even select more than one track at a time in Audition to do ANYTHING. Why?

You wouldn't even need those nests/folders/subsequences to be modifiable, I'm talking purely organization in the interface here. This is a super basic quality of life improvement that I would much rather have over whatever AI garbage the marketing department has the developers working on currently. I could have all my buses in a single folder, I could have groups of tracks nested by category, and then nested inside another group. I could really make my Multitrack environment a lot easier to manage, and I would love have those nests in Mixer view as well, even if they don't have individual controls or faders on them, that could still be the role of a bus. Why isn't this already a thing? Am I crazy or should this have been added as a feature a billion years ago?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Selecting more than one track at a time is very straightforward - just hold the Ctrl key down and click on them. Once you've done that you can do plenty of things - including multiple track cuts, moving just the tracks you've selected without having to group them, etc. If you are fed up with seeing too many tracks then in the Multitrack menu there's an option called Track Visibility, which can significantly declutter your display. No, this won't do everything you want, obviously, but ranting on a U2U forum won't get you anywhere either.

What gets developed for Audition doesn't depend on the market department's whims. It's based on the information the sales department gleans from what the big-ticket users (think 7 figures) want, because they are the ones paying the bills, not us. We've more or less given up getting any major improvements made to Audition - it's not because the devs don't want to do it, but for the foregoing reason, plus the fact that the team is now also doing audio for all the other groups (as far as I can make out) and they are spread pretty thin on the ground.

[Siansonea]

So "use something else" in other words. Good talk. Thanks.

[Siansonea]

Also, Control + click to select more than one track does not work for me, and I literally just updated to the latest build of Audition.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Just swiping a mouse over the tracks should highlight every one you hit to make a multiple selection - doesn't even that work?

The thing about Audition is that for some things, it's excellent but for others it's not so good. It's most definitely not a music creation tool, for instance. It's good for recording and manipulating live music (this is primarily what I use it for) and I think it's perfectly fine for general purpose speech radio for instance - indeed that was its primary use for many years; every radio station in the world had at least one copy, I think.

We knew from the outset that Adobe bought Syntrillium specifically because they hadn't got an audio team and they knew they needed one. But their primary use case for audio was its use in video and tv post-production, and it was somewhat inevitable that these would be the lines it developed along. In many ways it's quite amazing that it is still as good as it is when you consider that Adobe is, fundamentally, a visually-based company. And that is what Audition is there to support.

The other thing you have to ask (well, you do if you're me...) is whether Adobe would actually want a world-beating audio product. If they tried to create one it would require a lot of development time, and take time away from supporting all the other apps that have an audio component in them. And it would sell to whom, exactly? A relatively small number of people, I'm pretty sure. In relative terms, just one big ticket user annually purchases way more seats than the resulting increase in individual sales would result in, and they didn't even ask for it. However you look at it, they'd be making a rod for their own backs, and for what?

So on the one hand, it's frustrating. On the other hand, the landscape is looking pretty much inevitable, I'm afraid. We should be grateful for any crumbs we're thrown.

[Siansonea]

No, swiping the mouse over multiple tracks does not work. You can do that to select clips, but not tracks. I can select multiple clips, and I can bounce or mixdown clips to new tracks to my heart's content. I would like to be able to select multiple tracks. I have tried all the obvious things you have suggested, holding down Control, or Command, or Option, or some combination of those three and Shift. Selecting with the mouse was literally the first thing I tried.  

More to the point, though, was that I was trying to suggest some pretty basic, pretty obvious quality of life improvements to Adobe Audition, things people seem to have been asking for for years now, but your attitude seems to be "that's never going to happen so don't even bother asking". What is the purpose of this forum? Maybe I'm unclear on the concept and I need to see my way out.

Just out of curiosity, are you using a PC version of Adobe software? Because I'm on a Mac. I'm wondering if something is getting lost in translation or something because we are definitely not on the same page. Are you a regular user of Audition or are you just an Adobe 'expert' in general? 

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Yes the PC version, and I'm a long-term regular user - since well before it was Audition. I was also a part of the alpha and beta test teams (when they existed), and have seen the product right through, and what has and hasn't changed - which may explain why I can see what perhaps you can't; I have a long perspective (25+ years). I also ran AudioMasters, which was the extension of the original Syntrillium Cool Edit forum until we closed it. The 'Community Expert' label is misleading, and not my choice - I wouldn't dream of attempting to offer any help on most of Adobe's products!

The purpose of the forum is to explain to people who can't find ways to do things how they might be able to - if it's possible and, as you've discovered, not everything is. Most of the things people have asked to be added/changed/altered about Audition simply haven't happened - even when promised (like Bins, for instance). Yes you are correct that technically you can't select multiple tracks - there was one more thread about this where the previous Product Manager said he'd put it on the development plan. That was over a year ago. He's now left, and of course nothing has happened about it - as usual.

Another thing the forum is good for is sorting out what are real Audition bugs rather than user errors - actual bugs we stand some sort of chance of being rectified, although don't hold your breath - they can often take a while to get resolved. Also we can offer best practice advice, when requested, on all sorts of audio and acoustic issues.

[Siansonea]

Ah, so "use something else". Gotcha. Thanks.