EQ Magazine - February 2008 - (Page 82) Soft Machines ADOBE AUDITION 3 From Digital Audio Editor to Digital Audio Workstation Yes, that’s a MIDI piano roll you’re seeing, tabbed with additional ones for other MIDI tracks. Also note the Guitar Suite (along with several new effects listed in the effects section), and the customized blue tint for the interface. didn’t show the entire GUI and couldn’t be resized; on the plus side for instruments, the program bundles in a basic poly synth, bass synth, and sound font player. MIXING AND RECORDING TWEAKS by Craig Anderton When a big company buys a small one, anything’s possible. Fans of Syntrillium’s Cool Edit Pro feared the worst when it was bought by Adobe, but the company has more than done right by the program— not just with updates, but by keeping the price reasonable and remaining true to Cool Edit’s spirit. As a fully-functional trial download is available (Windows only), there’s little point in delving into pages of details; the question is whether you want to take the time to check out the software. While Audition 3 may just seem like version 2 with MIDI piano roll editing and VSTi support, look deeper. . . . MIDI: ON A (PIANO) ROLL Although Audition could import SMFs and handle ReWire, it couldn’t record or edit MIDI. V3’s piano roll editor changes that, but it’s different from the norm: Each MIDI track has its own “sequencer” (piano roll with other options), which pops up into a window with tabs for each sequencer. Another difference: If you want to undo a recording, there’s individual undo for each sequencer. MIDI guitarists, or those recording a MIDI band, rejoice—you can record into multiple tracks, yet undo recording for each track individually. The piano roll has editing views for notes, velocity, and controllers, with the usual marquee/pencil/eraser tools. Again, though, things are a little different, as these tools are designed for precision editing, not freehand drawing or erasing. Clicking on a velocity “tail” colors the note being affected, which is handy if you’re working on chords or clusters of notes; you can also ctrl-click multiple lines to adjust them, with values changing linearly (not ratiometrically—it would be nice to have the option). Of course, you can snap, quantize, and the like, as well as randomize velocity and “humanize” timing. There’s also a MIDI controller Learn function, and more interestingly, you can constrain to a scale, with a choice of key and mode (major, minor, and harmonic minor).This is cool, but a bit of a missed opportunity as there are certainly plenty of other scale options. Also, note that this happens on playback; you won’t hear the scale snap as you play. While there’s no support for MIDI effect plug-ins, or sophisticated filtering/editing options like Cubase’s Logical Editor, the VSTi/MIDI support adds an important creative element. However, I found that Cakewalk’s instruments (Dimension, Rapture, z3ta+, etc.) opened into a window that Several changes beef up Audition’s multitrack functionality: Clip handles make it easy to adjust fade curves (including grouped clips), auto-crossfades happen simply by overlapping clips, you can clone tracks, and do “ripple” edits that close the gap when you cut part of a clip. And while this feature isn’t new with Audition 3, it bears repeating: With two clicks, you can open multitrack audio in the edit view and apply sophisticated digital audio editing techniques. While other programs let you open up audio in other editors, Audition builds extremely sophisticated editing into the DAW itself. Another interesting twist is that Audition can save multitrack sessions in XML format. I have a feeling this is more of a “future-proof” feature than something that will change your life today, but with OMF fading to some degree, XML support is welcome. EFFECTIVE EFFECTS Audition has always had a superb roster of processors, and version 3 builds on that with a tube-modeled compressor, iZotope’s Radius pitch shift algorithms, a couple new restoration processors (adaptive noise reduction and automatic phase correction), mastering section that looks like a lite version of Ozone 3, “guitar suite” (with compressor, filter, distortion, and cabinet modeling—fun stuff!), and convolution reverb. Many people who habitually use other DAWs or editors purchased Audition for the restoration effects alone, and that won’t change.The noise reduction has always been outstanding; the frequency space editing introduced in version 2 deserves special mention. I’ve used it to do everything from excise the breathing noises of a classical 82 EQ FEBRUARY 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.