Adobe Audition
More info
- Owner
- Adobe
- Released
- 2003
- Type
- Audio editor
- License
- Proprietary (subscription)
- Predecessor
- Cool Edit Pro
Adobe's audio editor, which started life as the shareware program Cool Edit and is now mostly used for speech, podcasts and film.
David Johnston wrote Cool Edit in the 1990s and sold it as shareware through his company, Syntrillium Software. The multitrack version, Cool Edit Pro, was the home studio's workhorse before DAWs took over. Adobe bought Syntrillium in 2003 and renamed the program Audition; a Mac version didn't appear until 2011.
Its strength has always been editing rather than music production. The spectral view lets you lasso a cough, a phone ring or a passing siren out of a spectrogram, and its noise reduction was long the industry reference. Today it is part of Creative Cloud and lives closely alongside Premiere Pro, which routinely sends dialogue over to be cleaned up.