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Audition 3 Essential Training focuses on audio theory and mixing while explaining all of the new features in Audition 3. Audition can be used by home recording engineers, musicians, podcasters, radio production personnel, and anyone who wants to score their own videos. Your instructor is Bruce Williams, who has been in radio since 1987. He has been a carting guy, producer, and production manager. He's been showing people how to use Audition since 2005. This library is divided into 17 lessons and runs 6.5 hours.
Lesson 1, "Introduction" gives you an introduction to Audition 3, the training files, new features, and explains the essential preferences. Here he gives you an overview of how Audition works by explaining the three different views that you have available to you: Multitrack which is non-destructive, Edit which is destructive, and the CD burning views.
Lesson 2, "Audio Theory" introduces the concepts behind audio production. Before diving into Audition, Williams will go over needed concepts like frequency, sample rate, bit resolution, as well as other topics and how they relate to audio production.
Lesson 3, "Recording Essentials" examines the audio hardware dialog box, creating new files, the save options, and how to manage workspaces. In this lesson you learn about the options that you have available to you for your production.
Lesson 4, "File Management" continues with handling files and working with Adobe Bridge, how XMP info works, how to import files into Audition 3, and lots of great tips for working and managing files from within the file browser.
Lesson 5, "Working in Edit View" explores the various panels that make up the edit view interface. You will learn about the new Top and Tail view how best to work with this view. You will also learn how to understand and work with individual channels, working with peak program meters, using the loop play mode, working with sample rates, and how to understand the amplitude statistics.
Lesson 6, "Working with Spectral Displays" now switches to the various spectral displays that are available in Audition 3 as well as how to work with the appropriate brushes to manipulate the data and to get a better understanding of how frequency space editing works.
Lesson 7, "Using Audition's built-in Effects" transitions us to working with effects including delays and echos, filters and EQ effects, reverb, modulation, creating sounds from scratch, and how to load effects into the Effects Rack. Here Williams goes through some of them to get you started.
Lesson 8, "Working in Multitrack view" shows you how to get audio into the multitrack view, how to edit clips, and understanding time compression and expansion. He does this by showing how to create a new opener for a podcast as a real-world example.
Lesson 9, "The Mixer Panel" describes how the mixer panel works, how to use automation with it, applying affects, how to lock tracks so you don't inadvertently change something, as well as how to export your mix.
Lesson 10, "Working with Loops" will examine "Loopology," the large library that comes with Audition, that you can use in your mixes. Here he gives you a brief overview of how to put together original compositions by using a mixture of loops.
Lesson 11, "ReWire" is a product that was developed by Propellerheads software that allows two different audio applications to talk to each other using only one sound card. Here you will learn how to setup ReWire to communicate between the products Reason and Audition as well as how to work with the two products in combination.
Lesson 12, "Working with Video" now describes how to import audio from video, how to get video into Audition, cleanup your audio, as well as how to add a sound track to a video.
Lesson 13, "Surround Mixing" begins by introducing you to the Surround sound interface. From there you will learn how to assign track outputs, use pan envelopes to pan sound around within the five channel space, how to preview your mix, as well as exporting it as a multi-channel mix.
Lesson 14, "MIDI" is the predominant method for getting audio signals from electronic devices such as keyboards directly into Audition. In this lesson you will learn about MIDI, the interface, how to set up a VSTi, adding and removing sequencer tracks, and exporting a MIDI file.
Lesson 15, "Automating Tasks" introduces you to scripts so you can perform batch processing operations to speed up tasks. Lesson 16, "Audio Forensics" describes what a forensic engineer does and how to do things like clean up a telephone call and other problems with sound. Lesson 17, "Creating a CD" finishes up with how to prepare your audio for creating and burning a CD.
Williams comes across very knowledgeable in this presentation. His clear explanations make it really easy to learn the basics of Audition as well as audio editing and production. While he gets you to understand the concepts of audio editing and the use of best practices, I do wish that there would have been more do's and don'ts about audio production as well as a few sections that could have been more in depth. That said, I do think that if you are wanting to get into working with Auditon 3, want to learn more about audio engineering and audio production in general then I can easily recommend Audition 3 Essential Training.
You can get Audition 3 Essential Training two ways. One is as a DVD training package Audition 3 Essential Training and the other is part of the online training experience at Lynda.com. The DVD Training Package is $99.95 USD and includes Audition 3 Essential Training as well as containing everything you need.
The online training Audition 3 Essential Training comes in three flavors. For $25 USD/month, you get you all of the videos that are available online (approximately 30,768 videos on 458 topics at this time). Annual subsciptions are also available at $250 USD for Standard, or $375 USD for Premium, which gets you all the videos as well as all of the exercise files. Take note that the exercise files are not included with the monthly or Standard annual subscriptions. They are only included on the DVD and Premium subscriptions.
You can use Audition 3 Essential Training as a training program for the individual student, as well as the college or vocational teacher looking to supplement their educational materials. It is of benefit to anyone who needs help understanding Audition 3. You can also try out some sample lessons for free at Lynda.com.
