Single payment Adobe Audition licensing

Audition, like the rest of the CC apps, is only available as a subscription-based product. This is in part due to the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, which was ill-considered in terms of the potential outcomes for software. It forced manufacturers to have to make an expensive statement each year about how much finished product they'd sold. Adobe immediately realised that if software was continually updated, then it was never 'complete', so they didn't have to fill in the expensive registration forms - one for each product. And apparently it really is expensive. This is also why some other vendors have similar approaches to their products. In terms of keeping the software developed, I can see the advantages - it gives them a regular income that pays for development. In a very real sense, you are the last customer Adobe wants; you purchase a copy of the product and don't really want to update it, or pay them any more money. That, they would see as a lack of long-term committment, and they'd be right. And there are a lot of users in a similar situation - in some senses as a user I could include myself in this category, I suppose.

If you just want to record stuff, then I don't think you'd need anything other than Audacity.