by Scott Larson - Entercom Kansas City

We all use them, we all have our personal favs, some swear by ProTools, others by Soundforge, and many of us who transitioned from SawPlus to Cool Edit have found the simple joy in an interface that is easy to learn, fun to use and totally functional for what is demanded of us in our busy production world.

I use the 1.0 version of Adobe Audition, sure I could upgrade to 3.0 but why? I mean, it essentially does everything 1.0 does and there aren’t any new bells and whistles that I don’t already have with 1.0 so that’s the one I use (OK, my bosses won’t spring for the upgrade so I have to use what I we have installed but I do have the 3.0 version on my laptop for remotes). It’s this ease of use that I really love about the first version of Adobe Audition. The learning curve was about an hour and I learned I can develop some pretty cool effects presets with a little practice.

Because I work in a multi-station, multi-studio facility, I have two separate studios that I work out of in my primary duties which means I had to create two instances of the Audition. I simply transferred all my favorites settings to this the other studio and bodda bing, I’m all set. The only drawback to this is that some of these settings didn’t transfer and I had to recreate them, no biggie since I copy everything down on paper anyway (you never know when you’ll get a lightning strike and you have do a rebuild).

I know you’re asking yourself, how do you use 3.0 for remotes? Well plain and simple Marti is unreliable when you’re a long way from the transmitter site. So here’s what we do. We take our laptop, a ZOOM digital recorder and our wireless card and when we get to our location, we just record the breaks, edit them down to the required link and email them to ourselves at a Gmail account. Then the board op at the studio opens the same Gmail account and plays the mp3 at the scheduled time or records it into a VoxPro or something similar. It sounds fantastic, is extremely reliable and I can teach almost anyone how to use it (we have some folks that wanted to know where the splicing tape block was on the laptop). If you have a large enough drive you can drop some music underneath it, mix it down and have a self contained break ready for air. Cool, huh? My thanks to Shotgun Jaxxon (WDAF-FM Kansas City) for creating this innovative alternative to Marti broadcasting.
So you’re still asking “Well why do you LOVE Adobe Audition?” It is plain and simple. It’s the easiest to teach, the easiest to use, its portability is amazing and when you need to create masterpieces of audio production, it is by far the most reliable piece of audio software on today’s market.