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Well, the new version is out after a five year wait. As Audition is my main DAW I went ahead and purchased the upgrade and standalone while it was cheap. Academic pricing is pretty decent too.

My first impressions are that the code rewrite is very spiffy. A lot of the sluggishness of 3.01 is gone. My recording season is done until the fall baring some new project springing up so I haven't had a chance to compare it with Reaper's speed yet. Initially, I think it is very close and I'm able to run it on my many-use machine without any glitches at all.

The program is still 32 bit native so I'm not overly thrilled about that but everyone can't be Reaper. The GUI is slightly changed though there is a drop down menu to give a reasonable facsimile of the 3.0 workflow. Many of the areas of the GUI are now undockable and can be moved around or modified while listening/recording/VST-ing tracks. That is a BIG improvement in my mind.

One section that has been removed and I permanently is the CD authoring section. That is too bad as Audition has always made excellent CD's with it's very very high quality sample rate conversion. I don't like this at all but the workaround is easy. Audition CS 5.5 lives happily along side any previous version without glitch. I can make my master track with markers and BWAV info and simply import the final mixdown file into v3.01 for CD authoring. I suppose I should be moving to Wavelab or similar but the familiarity of Audition is too easy.

The FX suite that comes with CS 5.5 is missing some very crucial things in my opinion and likely in the opinion of any ME that use Audition as well as audio electronics designers and radio broadcast engineers (these three categories being the primary users of v2 and v3). Some of the stereo tools and noise generation tools are missing as well as few other VST's. Some/many of these will be re-integrated as the code is rewritten and some will be dropped. I'm crossing my fingers for the ones I use of course. In the meantime I'm on the hunt for a new suite of VST stereo plugins. Suggestions are welcome.

As one might expect, integration with Premiere Pro is very slick and easy and with Premiere CS 5.5 one can even export/import multitrack audio for editing and smoothly send it back to Premiere without issue.

Overall, I am impressed enough to continue recommending Audition especially since it is so much faster and sleeker than before. One won't need a Digi approved type computer to maximize Audition's potential. I still hope a 64 bit version is on the horizon but at the rate Adobe upgrade's their products-especially niche products-I may be retired by then :tongue:

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RemyRAD Sat, 05/14/2011 - 16:54

John, I was always under the impression that while I love Audition (1.5) and have utilized & purchased version 2.0 & 3.0 for some of my clients, CD burning has always been track at once and not disc at once. This might make it just fine for many but not for making stampers for replication purposes. That requires disc at once. But hey, if the client wants 1 or 2 CDs to send to the folks or grandparents, track at once might be adequate but it's nothing I've used for any professional application Or purpose, since 1996. This might be the reason why it was eliminated in this new 5.5 version? I haven't bothered to upgrade mine because it doesn't really sound like much of a really good reason to do so? Of course 1.5 is not ASIO enabled like their later versions. I actually prefer my 1.5 over 3 except when I need that ASIO support such as for my Digi M-box 2 if I'm not using semi-ProTools. For multitrack purposes, I generally get around that by utilizing my HD 24XR. I rarely need more than 2 tracks to record with on my laptops/desktops. Occasionally 4 but that's what the other M-box2 can do with an external A/D converter which is a kludge. This might really be one of those updates that is more from a marketing standpoint than an actual update/upgrade. Like the automobile manufacturers, one must change the style of the turn signal lens for next year's model. We might all be audio professionals but we still have to have a little reason to jump.

You can difibrilate a frog with a 9 V battery.
Mx. Remy Ann David

TheJackAttack Sat, 05/14/2011 - 17:07

I confess to jumping from CE Pro directly to V2 then V3. In both 2 & 3 disc at once was exactly how I authored the CD's. I would take my stereo mixdown at 88.2k/24 and add all my markers, fades, BWAV info and then add the whole single entity to the CD portion. It is possible to add separate tracks also but that's not how I usually did it. At least Audition claimed to create red book. At any rate, it is gone and not coming back according to all the busy bodies at the Adobe forums. 20 is about the limit of my CD runs anyway unless it is music festival time.

I've always gotten along well with the multitrack portion. The routing etc was always quite logical to me and mimicked the analog boards I had used prior to going digital. Adobe's own marketing research does suggest that it was the editing tools, scientific tools, and conversion engine that the majority of folks purchased Audition for-especially for radio broadcast.

At any rate, I suspect CS6 will finish adding some of the scientific filters and VST stock items back in. In the mean time though it is tons faster than before and I'll just have to decide on Wavelab or similar for Redbook purposes.

RemyRAD Sat, 05/14/2011 - 17:30

And here I thought I knew the product well? My bad. I actually got one client version 2 another one version 3 and I guess I must've not read up like I thought I did. I think what I did was assume the same for my earlier versions except they needed ASIO support for their interfaces. And we always know what happens to one, when one assumes anything and I have a big one of those.

Asszoom the wurst
Mx. Remy Ann David