Pros & Cons
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- Strong audio restoration, sound removal, and noise reduction tools
- Useful visualization modes
- Adheres to film and television broadcast standards for audio
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- Available only via an expensive monthly subscription
- Lacks MIDI and virtual instrument support
- Limited scoring facilities
Adobe Audition CC Specs
| Audio Tracks | 128 |
| Bundled Content | 8GB |
| Effects | 50 |
| Instruments | 0 |
| Mixer View | |
| Subscription Plan |
Adobe Audition is powerful, cross-platform audio editing software in a category of its own. It has specialized tools for cleaning up and restoring audio, offers precise, nondestructive editing for corporate and commercial video and podcasts, and is stellar in postproduction. Audition also functions as a digital audio workstation (DAW), though it's too limited and expensive for that role, given its lack of music-composition tools. From sitting your audio clips just right in a video project or podcast to crafting sound effects for video games to ducking music to spotlight voice-overs, Audition is a pleasure to use. But our Editors' Choice winners for multitrack recording and mixing, Apple Logic Pro, Avid Pro Tools, and Steinberg Cubase, are more capable audio production tools in a much wider array of contexts.
Pricing: A Costly Subscription With Questionable Value
Audition began life as a program called Cool Edit by Syntrillium Software. I remember it from its Cool Edit Pro days, when it was multitrack-enabled. Adobe bought the product from Syntrillium in 2003, relaunched it as Audition soon after, and has continued to develop it ever since.
As with other Adobe software, Audition is available only via subscription. Prices have gone up since our last test. Audition now costs $22.99 per month with an annual commitment, $34.49 on a month-to-month plan, or $263.88 for a prepaid annual plan. It's also available as part of Adobe's Creative Cloud plan, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and more. That subscription costs $69.99 per month with an annual commitment, or $104.99 per month. If you stop paying, Audition stops working, and you keep nothing.
Whether these plans make sense to you depends on your needs. If you're the type of audio engineer who buys software once and uses it professionally until the developer no longer supports it years later, Audition will prove a much more expensive proposition than Logic Pro (a flat $199.99 forever, with free upgrades). But if you upgrade your audio workstation often—paying hundreds of dollars up front and then $99 or $149 every couple of years to get new versions—Audition makes more sense. However, keep in mind that Adobe has added only two features in the past two years: a brightness slider for your workspace and native Windows on Arm support.
Audition's value proposition is best for you if you already use Adobe Premiere and pay for a Creative Cloud subscription. Still, to put all this in perspective, three years of working with Audition will cost you at least $791.64 (with a prepaid annual plan). That's a lot.
System Requirements: Wide Compatibility Across Modern Platforms
To install Audition, you need a multi-core PC running Windows 11 or a Mac running macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer. Audition now runs natively on Windows on Arm and Apple silicon. In all cases, Adobe requires 8GB of RAM but recommends 16GB or more.
For this latest review, I tested Audition on a Mac Studio (M4 Max, 2025) running macOS Tahoe 26.3.1 with 64GB RAM, a 1TB SSD, a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 (2nd Gen) audio interface, a pair of PreSonus Eris E8 XT studio monitors, a Novation Launchkey mk4 MIDI controller, and a 32-inch LG display. You need to run the Creative Cloud desktop app in the background, which you install during setup. By default, Audition collects usage data, but you manually opt out after installation.
Audio Editing and Restoration: Polished, Efficient, and Powerful
Audition offers two modes: the Waveform view for stereo editing and the Multitrack view for mixing tracks on a timeline. It's simple to flip between these two at will. In the Waveform view, recording audio and adjusting volume levels are simple. An attractive spectral frequency editor lets you attack the recorded wave in different ways. You can punch a recording from a specific point within a clip and quickly zoom in to the same range on multiple selected clips.
The Multitrack view is where Audition looks like a typical digital audio workstation. Here, you drop audio clips on different tracks, such as a voice-over on top of ambient sounds or music stems, or mix recorded interview segments together to create a podcast. As expected, the interface fully supports drag-and-drop, and you can cut or trim clips for seamless, nondestructive edits. That's unlike the Waveform editor, where edits are destructive. Overall, Audition is a nice step up from Audacity or GarageBand for recording podcasts.
Clip and Session Markers help you position, arrange, and synchronize clips, and attach comments, in the multitrack view (above), not just in waveform view. You can add markers anywhere with the M modifier key and view all of them with the Markers button in the toolbar at the top. Audition now lets you choose a custom speed for your audio using the existing JKL Shuttle Speed controls (normally just back, stop, or forward). The four speed defaults are 0.1x, 0.5x, 1x, and 2x, and you can set custom speeds (such as 1.1x) using the L key.
The Loudness Meter lets you analyze full mixes, single tracks, or any bus or submix in real time. It includes presets for common regional broadcast requirements and for streaming services such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Netflix. This is one of the trickiest aspects of producing audio these days, as every service seems to have a different idea of the target LUFS level (and LUFS itself isn't a fixed target to begin with). It will save you trips to loudnesspenalty.com or similar benchmark tests.
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You can use the Strip Silence tool to remove inactive regions in recorded clips without losing sync in multitrack audio—perfect for the fast cleanup of interviews, podcasts, and other multitrack recordings. The feature includes adjustable parameters to compensate for background noise or uneven volume levels among participants.
Another valuable tool, DeReverb, lets you reduce or remove reverberation from an existing audio file. It can handle big, spacious reverbs or short delays (echoes). DeNoise removes hiss and hum from existing files, but more transparently and certainly easier than the older Noise Reduction feature. Instead of requiring you to first create a noise print from a quiet period of the audio or fine-tune the exact frequencies and dB levels to achieve an acceptable result, DeNoise does it in real time with no latency. You just have to control how much noise reduction you want. It also lets you preview the noise print it's removing on its own as a reality check.
The Sound Remover tool is another winner. You can get transparent results using it to remove an errant bump, paper shuffling, or even a car alarm from an otherwise perfect take. The auto-ducking works with ambient sounds, allowing you to manually enter time and parameter values for keyframes.
The Mixer view looks a little cluttered, mostly because of the overly thin sliders, but Audition's metering and support for console effects are plenty strong. It's easy to strip multiple audio channels from MXF and other video formats using the Multitrack view. For example, suppose you record a scene for film or television using multiple microphones (or even in 5.1). In that case, Audition lets you store each recorded file in a discrete channel in the file and then configure the routing of the source channels to each corresponding clip channel. Audition also includes an Essential Sound panel that targets beginners. To use it, select a clip and then choose a Mix Type, such as Dialogue. Audition then shows you only a few crucial adjustments that are probably the most important for that task, such as removing a click or making it sound clearer. A total of more than 50 audio effects are available.
One of Audition's most powerful features is its Favorites, which lets you set up macros that perform a series of common operations on wave after wave, such as normalizing or converting to stereo. In tandem with Favorites is Batch Processing, which lets you perform tricks like matching an entire group of clips to broadcast regulations or analyzing the frequency and even the phase of recordings—this would have saved me a ton of time on some older video game sound design projects I worked on years ago. The program makes it easy to export broadcast-ready audio in various formats that comply with loudness standards worldwide for commercials, films, radio, and television.
Recording and Mixing Audio: Not Built for Full-Scale Production
Adobe no longer markets Audition for live multitrack recording, but the software's features and limitations are worth knowing. First, the good stuff. The audio rendering engine is powerful enough to handle up to 128 tracks or record 32 tracks simultaneously without stuttering. You can also select, adjust, and delete multiple tracks simultaneously. Audition bundles several thousand royalty-free loops and over 10,000 sound effects to get you started with postproduction.
Audition also offers a music Remix tool that attempts to automate the creation of new versions of a song without sending it to an actual remixer or mix engineer for changes. It lets you adjust a song's target duration to get exactly the right cut. Say you shorten the song by 30 seconds; the Remix tool will go in and adjust the song segments, splicing them in a way that's pretty much seamless to the listener, assuming it's not a song most people recognize. You can customize splices by telling it to favor shorter segments with longer transitions or vice versa. More importantly, you can configure Audition to favor rhythm (timbre) elements so that the beat stays locked when necessary or to favor harmonic structure when it's a group of vocalists or stringed instruments playing without an easily discernible beat.
I find the Remix tool great for library tracks you're not super particular about or custom music for a specific project. But having worked on the other side of this as a composer for years, I'd still say just ask the composer for their opinion and possibly an extra cut of the song at a different length, if it's possible within the parameters of your contract with them.
Despite its high cost, Audition isn't a full-featured digital audio workstation. If you're coming from Avid's Pro Tools or another DAW, Adobe doesn't include any software instrument libraries with Audition. There's no score editor or internal MIDI support. None of this is part of Audition's intended mission, but for its price, the omissions are harder to forgive, given its other scoring and postproduction facilities. Audition can help cut and produce a score for video, and you can drop in loops in a pinch, but aside from the aforementioned Remix tool, it assumes the music is already done.
That said, if you've already got Audition for other reasons and want to use it to record a band, you certainly can. You can even pitch-correct vocals and master the track with a multi-band compressor and limiter. But Logic Pro and Pro Tools can better serve you here. Besides, third-party add-ons, such as iZotope RX, are available for restoring audio in other DAWs, should you need tools similar to those that Audition offers for other kinds of projects.