The Wave Display offers two ways to represent audio data: Waveform View and Spectral View. Switch between the two methods using Adobe Audition’s View menu. Click near the top of the left (upper) channel to select the left channel only. That's the spectral frequency display view in the Edit screen of Adobe Audition. Other digital audio workstations will also have one. Here, we're looking at the squeak of a door opening. Open: Adobe Audition CS6. Note: Adobe Audition CS6 is licensed on campus computers. The Adobe program is a part of one of many available Adobe. Spectral Frequency View Tool: Select this to view the spectral frequency beneath the waveform. Spectral Pitch Display: Select this to view.

Free real-time audio analyser with 8 kHz spectral bandwidth. Display any sort of audio from the microphone as a coloured spectrogram. Identify environmental noise, search for annoying tones, view harmonic patterns of instruments and voices, analyse the frequency range of your speaker. Bugs and feedback to: info@radonsoft.net.

One of my favorite features in Adobe Audition is its ability to edit audio with spectral displays giving you a lot of control over your stereo audio file. With the spectral display, you see how the frequencies dominate in the audio. This might sound confusing initially so let's first talk about the spectral view and then how to use it to edit your audio.

The Spectral View

In the spectral view, also known as spectral frequency analysis, the audio is analyzed by the application and then it will display a view that is very colorful. The bottom represents the low bass register, and the higher frequencies are represented at the top. The brighter the color, the stronger it is in that region. Left to right is the timeline like the standard audio waveform view.

So for example if there is a bright orange area at 500 Hz, then there will be a louder bassier sound at that point in the timeline.

Spectral Tools

Now let's see how you navigate to this spectral view. Add an audio file to the waveform editor by simply dragging it in. This will show you the audio waveform view for the audio file. Then go to View > Show Spectral Frequency Display or use the shortcut Shift-D.

To show less or more of the view, you can drag this up or down. When I'm working in the spectral view, I like to drag it all the way up so that I get a nice big view of the spectral frequency range. You'll see the Hz meter on the right, and there are two views if it's a stereo file.

The tools you can use to make selections on the spectral view are at the top. The best tools to use are the Time Selection Tool, the Marquee Selection tool, and the Lasso Tool. The Time selection tool selects areas from left to right. The Marque tool can select from left to right plus you can control the horizontal area you want to select as well. With the Lasso tool, you can draw in your own custom selections.

Editing Audio in the Spectral View

Audition Spectral Viewer

Now let's see how you can edit audio with the spectral frequency view. I have an audio file that has a bass part with a shaker. I want to remove the shaker using spectral editing.

When I pull this audio file into Audition and view the spectral view, I can see that the bass is sitting in the 0'1 k region, and then the shakers occupy from 2 kHz up to 20 kHz.

Here is the included audio loop so you can follow along with me:

Let's see how we can remove the shakers. Select the Marquee Selection tool. Now drag in a selection from 2 kHz up to 20 kHz .

When you play back you'll hear just what is in the selection. Now on the floating volume level dial, dial this all the way to the left to reduce this selection's volume level.

Click somewhere else off the selection to deselect the region. Now play back and hear how the shaker has been removed. You can still hear a bit more shaker so let's reduce it some more. I'm going to draw in another selection going from 2 kHz to 1 kHz. But this time I'm only going to drop the level by 10 dB for a more natural sound between the two. It's getting closer. You can keep going and remove more. After a couple more attempts, here are my results:

Alternatively I could have also removed the bass. You can see the bass quite easily as it is the bright orange-yellow area in the bottom 0'500 Hz region. I've removed everything from 0 Hz to 2 kHz. This removes some of the low midrange of the shaker, but has perfectly removed the bass.

Spectral Frequency View Audition

Lasso Editing

With the Lasso edit tool, you can get quite creative. I've used the lasso tool to draw in my name, and then have reduced these selections to remove alphabet looking spots in the spectral frequency view. Now listen how this has manipulated the audio

How cool is that? You can go wild with this tool and manipulate the spectral domain in interesting ways. You can imagine how helpful this tool can also be to clean up low hiss and noises in your audio recordings as well.

Conclusion

That's how to use the spectral view in Audition to do spectral editing on your audio. You see how powerful this tool. You can use it to clear out specific sounds in your recorded audio, or you can use it to manipulate your sounds as well. Try the spectral editing out and see how it can help in your music productions and audio editing.

1. Waveform Vs.Multitrack

Audition has two main views for working with audio. Waveform view is where you perform detailed edits on individual audio files, either in regular transient view or one of the two spectral views available. This is good for the more forensic tasks – identifying clicks, pops or clipping, and reaching inside sounds to alter certain frequencies spectrally. Multitrack view is much more like how a DAW works: a linear, stacked group of tracks. You can use this either to record and mix sound in a conventional sense – say, recording a band – or to create audio montages, multitracking different sounds over time. This approach is ideal for sound to video, podcasts, radio broadcasts and the like.

2. Apply effects to parts of clips

Audition Spectral Views

There’s a difference in Audition between effects that are applied to a track and those applied to a clip. Track FX are basically like inserts in a DAW, affecting all audio on the track and being processed in realtime. Clip FX are applied onto a clip, but don’t affect any other clips on the same track. Within a clip effect you also have the option of selecting just a part of the waveform and applying an effect (or several effects at once) to that area. In the FX rack, select Process Selection Only and hit Apply. By doing this you can for example apply compression just to one loud part of a clip, but leave the rest untouched.

3. Understand Fades

Audition will automatically create fades when you drag one clip over part of another clip on the same track in Multitrack view. This means you don’t have to do it yourself and it’s a great tip for quickly overlapping sounds without creating jarring transitions. You can manually adjust the fade curves by picking up their handles (the grey boxes) and these also exist at the start and end of any clip. So to fade between clips on different tracks, simply drag one fade curve out and the other one in. No processing required.

4. The FX Rack is more flexible than you might realise

The FX rack is a great way to manage the realtime or “glued down” processing you choose to apply to clips. As well as having 16 slots per clip or track, it also has a bunch of ready made presets for all kinds of common tasks, and of course you can save your own presets from the window as well. It also has input and output level controls for the rack as a whole, and most importantly, a dry/wet master control. This enables you to control how much of the effected signal is blended with the dry, regardless of whether you’re using one effect in the rack or all 16 slots.

5. Know Your Workspaces

Each of Audition’s many sections can be called up or hidden from the Window menu, and window borders can be dragged manually. All sections can also be undocked from the main one-window interface so that they float, and re-docked by dragging their title bars to an area. At the top of the main window is a menu containing various preset workspaces and you can quickly flip between these to call up different combinations of tools and displays. If you select Window > Workspace and choose Edit Workspaces you can manage the list, creating your own custom ones as well. Although the single window interface is perfect for laptops, and very flexible, if you are working on a bigger project it can be helpful to spin off, say, the mixer to its own window so you can get a better view of everything.

6. Get Inside Frequencies With Spectral View

Audition Spectral Viewing

By switching into Spectral view from Waveform view, you will see a visual representation not just of the amplitude of a clip but also its frequency characteristics. The tools that then become available – select, lassoo, paint brush and healing brush – allow you to select frequencies visually and perform actions on them. In this way you can for example find a background noise that occurs during someone’s speech, and effectively delete it. Using regular EQ tools this would be almost impossible to do without affecting the speech. There’s also a spectral pitch view that lets you see different pitches represented graphically.

7. Batch Process Files

Sometimes, you need to change the properties or format of a bunch of files. Audition’s batch processor lets you do this easily, and has presets for things like normalizing files, removing hum, removing vocals and so on. You can also use it to convert lots of files to new formats – 48kHz WAVs to 44.1kHz MP3s, for example. You can choose to keep these files inside Audition’s browser for use in a project, or fire them out to your hard drive so they exist independently and can be transferred to other apps.

8. Know About Essential Sound

The Essential Sound panel which can be invoked from the Window menu is an interesting addition to the CC world. What it does is let you assign a type to any clips in a project – dialogue, music, sfx or ambience. Each of these categories has its own set of effects / parameters that can be controlled like EQ, dynamics, enhancement and so on. These provide a quick way to clean up or process types of clip instead of using the FX rack.

More importantly, these characteristics and tags are kept when you fire audio projects through to Premiere, provided you’re using the latest version of both apps. This means that audio data can be much more easily tagged, organised and recognised in both apps. For anyone working with multichannel video projects this is great news as it really speeds up your audio workflow when dealing with multiple audio tracks along with video. It’s also good with radio or podcast projects.