Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition is a professional audio editing and mixing application by Adobe, available through Creative Cloud subscription. It handles multitrack recording, spectral editing, noise reduction, podcast production, and sound design for film and video. It runs on Windows and macOS.

What it does

Audition has two main workspaces. The Waveform Editor is for single file editing - cutting, trimming, fading, and applying effects to one audio file at a time. The Multitrack Editor lets you arrange dozens of tracks on a timeline with per-track volume, pan, mute, and effects racks. Drag audio files onto tracks, set crossfades, and mix everything down to a final file.

The spectral frequency display is where Audition separates itself from cheaper tools. Switch to spectral view and you can see audio as a color-coded frequency map. Use the Paintbrush or Lasso tool to select and remove specific sounds - a cough in a recording, a chair squeak, a phone buzz, a dog bark in the background - without affecting the surrounding audio. The noise reduction tools (Noise Reduction, DeClicker, DeHummer, DeReverb) are all non-destructive and work in real time.

For podcast work, the Match Loudness panel (Window > Match Loudness) normalizes episodes to broadcast standards like -16 LUFS. Batch processing lets you apply the same effect chain to hundreds of files at once.

Who it is for

I keep Audition around specifically for spectral editing and batch loudness matching - those two features alone justify it for podcast post-production work. If you already pay for Creative Cloud and do audio work alongside Premiere Pro, Audition is the obvious choice. If you only need basic recording and noise cleanup, I would start with Audacity instead.