Overview

Adobe Audition is a professional sound editing software program that you can download that allows you to edit songs or other sound recordings and use various effects on it too.

Cost: A free 30-day trial is available from Adobe after that you can buy it for $149 for a student or $349 for a non-student (or if you know of some other way to acquire it, be my guest)

Available: On a PC or a Mac computer

Details

Because this is a professional software program, it's kind of extensive in what can be done, and I'm not even exactly sure I know how to use it to its fullest extent. So, I'm just going to cover the basics of uploading multiple tracks. For more details on what you can do you can ask me, or go here for Adobe's PDF guide. Adobe also has video tutorials that you can watch that highlight certain features and walk you through the steps, and those can be found here.

You can upload sound files that are on your computer (and it can be songs in iTunes or your own personal recordings; it accepts a wide range of formats). It allows multiple tracks, so you can have more than one sound file uploaded so that you can combine several and save into one sound file (like if you were remixing, for example).

Here's the basic look with one sound file uploaded:

As you can tell, I've selected a clip from the song, and you can right click on the clip to change it or add effects, or you can go to the "Edit" or "Effects" tab at the top.

Here's what it looks like when you've uploaded multiple tracks and are looking at it in that view:

From what I can tell, you can upload as many tracks as you want (at least I haven't found a limit anyway). In order to edit the individual tracks, it's easier to double click on that track that you want to change. Then, it will focus on that file where you can select the part of the clip you would like to change, delete, add an effect to etc. Once you are satisfied with your changes, you can return to the multitrack view (button on the top on the left) to see where to move it in relation to your other tracks (It autosaves every so often for you).

As far as effects go, there are preset levels you can choose to use, or manually change it. There are the usual: reverse, silence, normalize, echo, delay etc., as well as other distortion types of effects. Really, I would just play around with it to figure out what you like if you're not really sure what the different effects are (that's why there's an Undo command!). I will say, I reversed a section of the song I randomly uploaded (which happened to be Sara Bareillis's song "King of Anything," and it sounds WAY cool and like she's speaking some Gaelic language or something).

My Thoughts

Pros: Professional software that lets you change many things and have a wide range of different effects, and it lets you upload several tracks to edit together.

Cons: Because of it's complexity, you have to be willing to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to use it, especially if you are new to sound editing and to the program. It's not very easy to figure out right off the bat, so it takes some time and you have to be willing to play around with it to see what works. Also, once the 30 days is up on your trial, not sure if you want to pony up the dinero for it (although I do believe all the ATEC computers have it, as well as the class Macs).

For those that were in Kim's EMAC 6300 class last semester, Sydnie and I used Adobe Audition to put together our song and audio clips of class for our remix of the class:

Remediation and Remix-Montgomery and Tanner by missnesbit

~Mattie Tanner (Miss Nesbit)