Learn Series Part 1: An intro to Adobe Audition

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey]

Part 2 >> 

This is a part of the ongoing Learn series with Mike Russell which will help you get started with Adobe Audition. We've some interesting articles & videos coming up weekly where we will talk about the tools, workflow & some really cool effects. Let us know how you use Audition & what you want to learn about Adobe Audition. We're here to help.

This video will help you learn the basics and give you an overview of Adobe Audition. Learn how to setup your audio hardware, record, mix, add effects, and edit your compositions. This video will also help you in familiarizing with the essential tools, panels, and features in Audition.

Topics discussed in this video

0:11 Set up your audio hardware

1:21 Configure Audio Hardware preferences to ensure that your preferred audio devices are selected for Input and Output

2:09 Configure Audio Channel mapping- Learn  to set up audio hardware and channel mapping in detail

2:44 How to record and playback audio- Learn more about recording audio in Audition

3:32 How to use levels meter to ensure recorded audio is not clipping and is getting recorded at correct audio levels- Learn more about Level meters 

5:03 Tour of a few essential panels

• Files panel
• Media Browser panel- Learn about importing files using these panels 
  Pro tip: Enable Auto-Play    in the Media browser panel to automatically play the selected clip. This can help in quickly previewing the clips before importing.
  
• Effects Rack panel
• Markers panel  
• Properties panel
• History panel 
• Video Panel
• Levels panel
• Essential Sound panel 

7:24  Discussing workspaces- Learn more about workspaces 

8.06 Working with selections- Learn about the audio selection in Audition 

8:47  Add Effects using Effects Rack panel

• 9:04 Discussing EQ (Para EQ)
• 10:12 Discussing Compression
• 11.39 Noise reduction using Spectral Frequency Display
• 13:26 Noise reduction using DeNoise plugin

14:34 Discussing Multitrack Editor to mix different audio tracks together- Learn more about Multitrack Editor

17:03 Using Hard Limiter 

17:37 Pan audio 

17:53  Multitrack mixdown- Learn how to export multitrack down files
18:16  Save the mix as an audio file- Learn how to save files from the Waveform editor

19:00 The magic trick- Can we do anything to restore heavily clipped audio? 

20:15 A quick recap of what Adobe Audition can do

We also recommend going through these articles to understand the fundamentals of Digital Audio.

• Understanding sound
  Read this document to understand the basics of sound
• Digitizing audio
  Learn about digitizing audio

Hope you find it useful. That’s just a taste of what Audition can do. Think of Audition as a soundstage for storytelling, an Adobe design app for audio with all of the tools you need for telling stories with audio of any kind. Refer to this page to explore the other videos of this series

Part 2 >> 

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Oh dear. The advice you get from this video about processing order really isn't going to help you very much, I'm afraid. There are good reasons for processing audio in a particular order, and they are all to do with the effect on the dynamics of your recording.

If you have constant background noise in your recording, you should remove it first, before any other processing at all - especially compression. If you compress a signal before NR, then the background level of the noise is going to alter, and the NR really isn't going to cope with that very well; what was previously a constant noise is now modulated by the compression. So no, you don't do this after other alterations you may make.

Similarly, if you apply EQ before compression, the effect is to vary the amount of EQ at any particular level that's been applied beforehand. This is more subtle, but it's the reason that breakpoints on real life mixers (where you'd insert a compressor) come before the EQ, not after them.

So to be most effective, the treatment order is NR first, then compression, and finally EQ.

[Mike Russell]

Thanks for the feedback here Steve.

I think you may have read the bullet points in the post above instead of watching the video where I explain everything in detail as I absolutely agree that noise reduction should be done before anything else for all the reasons you mention.

As for EQ before or after compression it's a good discussion and I've given my reasons for the way I do it in reply to your post here.