Adobe Audition review

Adobe Audition is a powerful audio editing tool, perfect for bloggers, podcasters and content editors.

Adobe Audition review 2020
(Image: © Adobe)

Top Ten Reviews Verdict

Adobe Audition is a superb audio editor with an intuitive interface, powerful editing and repair tools as well as cloud based systems. But it's not cheap.

Pros

  • +

    Intuitive interface

  • +

    Superb restoration and repair tools

  • +

    Noise print feature is excellent

Cons

  • -

    Expensive

  • -

    Lacks music-specific focus

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Adobe Audition is a powerful and widely useful audio editing tool. It's a great option for vloggers and podcasters, featuring some of the best audio restoration smarts on any audio editing software out there right now.

An Adobe Audition review wouldn't be fair without a look at the software from the perspective of musicians. While this does offer a lot of functionality, this isn't a stand alone tool for professional musicians, but rather, works well as a part of a wider toolkit.

Since the layout of the software is so intuitive, it's possible to carry out complex and powerful audio editing in a straightforward way that's welcoming even to less experienced users. Of course, being Adobe, all this doesn't come cheap, with that Creative Cloud subscription payment model – but it certainly justifies the price, and Audition is the top pick in our guide to the best audio editing software today.

Adobe Audition review: Features

Adobe Audition isn't generally classed as a digital audio workstation (DAW) despite it offering many of those features. You get recording, manipulation, editing and production of audio. It does this with a multitrack environment and super detailed audio manipulation tools and enhancements, all with an intuitive and speedy workflow. Yet it's lacking musicality of more dedicated DAWs.

That isn't a bad thing. This simply has a broader range of uses, which is why this is a great option for videographers and podcasters that want to work with all kinds of audio, not just music.

Adobe Audition

(Image credit: Adobe)

The single and multitrack editing follows a familiar timeline layout with a simple and clean, dark shade for single and color coded clarity for multi. All that makes for a very focused and easy to use interface.

Adobe Audition works with a host of audio interfaces and mixers. Once the audio appears, you get a waveform which allows you to edit on a precise, granular level. This is superb for restoring or cleaning audio, but more on that in the next section.

Recording vinyl into Audition is a fantastic use of its powers, allowing you to tidy up the clarity of the audio, removing any pops or fuzz that might get picked up. The tools available for mixing, mastering and exporting are excellent, making this ideal for sample editing.

It's worth nothing the lack of MIDI, which is what separates this from more music specific DAWs out there.

Adobe Audition review: Performance

The first and most important feature to mention is Adobe Audition's ability to remaster audio. This is what makes it perfect for podcasters and videographers working with sample audio. Since you can edit on a granular, waveform level, it's just a matter of patience and time that limits how perfect you want the end result.

Adobe Audition

(Image credit: Adobe)

One feature that gets a lot of love is the 'noise print'. This allows you to find a noise, like a low-level background hum for example, and then highlight that as a 'noise print'. Audition will then go through the rest of the file and remove any matching frequencies, saving you time cleaning up the file as a whole. 

In our tests the results were outstanding. Virtually all of the noise from the recording was removed, and the vocal in the recording was uncompromised. This was one of the best audio restoration results that we'd heard from all of our audio testing.

The reverb remover plugin is also a really useful feature that worked well. If you've got audio recorded with an echo, say reverb on a voice, this will remove it will a single click, it's that easy.

There's a wide audio compatibility on offer here. We imported a wide variety of audio files formats into the Audition audio editing program to test for file compatibility. We were able to import all of the file extensions that we tested for including AAC, AIFF, AU, FLAC, MP3, MP4, M4A, OGG, WAV and WMA. Once we imported the files, we converted them to different audio formats. 

Should you buy Adobe Audition?

If you want a powerful yet easy to use audio editor for videography, podcasts and content recorders, then this is the tool for you. That also applies to anyone that wants to restore audio, from recordings, vinyl and more. But if you want to work with music, purely, then this is a powerful part of a toolkit but doesn't replace a dedicated DAW.

Adobe isn't cheap and the subscription Creative Cloud model isn't for everyone. But if you want audio restoration and editing at its easiest and most powerful then this does justify the expense. 

Luke Edwards

Luke is a veteran tech journalist with decades of experience covering everything from TVs, power tools, science and health tech to VPNs, space, gaming and cars. You may recognize him from appearances on plenty of news channels or have read his words which have been published in most tech titles over the years. In his spare time (of which he has little as a father of two) Luke likes yoga, surfing, meditation, DIY and consuming all the books, comics and movies he can find.