- Hello, I'm Mike Russell from musicradiocreative.com.
In this mini series,
I'm looking at the preferences menu of Adobe Audition
so you can get set up with everything
to make great sounding audio.
Today, we're looking at "Data and Effects."
(upbeat music)
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So here I am in Adobe Audition.
And two really great parts of the preferences menu today.
On PC, it's under edit, preferences.
Under Mac, it's under the Adobe Audition menu preferences.
You can also hit Control + , or Command + , to get this up.
And I'm gonna go into data first and foremost,
and this is why I love Adobe Audition.
Here, you've got two little boxes ticked automatically.
I advise leaving them ticked and leaving them as default,
but just so you know what they do,
I'll show you what they do.
The first one, smooth delete/cut boundaries
with crossfades of two milliseconds.
Okay, so what this means is when I make a little delete
or a cut in my wave form here,
it's actually gonna crossfade the cut I made
to make it sound smoother than just a standard cut
where you can sometimes get like a click in audio.
Let me increase the number of milliseconds
to the maximum 40 and show you how this works practically.
If I zoom now here,
and I make a dramatic cut from here to silence,
there we go, let's do that.
You can see there's a bit of a fade-out,
a 40 millisecond fade-out going on on that audio.
Let's play back. - Via a variety
of computer in-
- Okay, so you heard it just faded-off.
Now, if I undo this, go back into the data area
of preferences and make this zero milliseconds
and we'll try and do that cut again,
you'll see now, I get a very harsh cut
and it's not gonna sound so good.
- [Voiceover] Variety of computer in-
- It's like a click straight off like that.
So Audition by default has that set at two milliseconds.
I think that's sufficient and it's a nice little buffer
as some audio editors definitely don't do that
and it's a required feature in my opinion.
Down here, smooth all edit boundaries
by crossfading five milliseconds.
So when you're applying effects to your audio,
you can actually crossfade in those effects
to make them sound more natural.
Five milliseconds, you won't really hear a difference,
although it does make a difference, an imperceptible one.
If I push this right up to say,
let's make it 2000 milliseconds,
you can make this quite large, this number.
This will be two seconds of crossfade.
So now, if I was to go and get some of the audio here
and we can see, okay, so this is about two seconds here.
So if I select all of this
and then I add a really crazy effect,
let's go into effects here.
We'll go into modulation and we go to chorus,
and we'll put on a really crazy chorus here.
- [Voiceover] In which my visitors
and subscribers...
- Okay, that's definitely noticeable.
Let's click apply and let's listen
to how that effect fades in.
- [Voiceover] The available on demand in which my visitors
and subscribers will be...
- So over two seconds, you hear that effect slowly fading in
and that is exactly what the second dialogue box here
in the data section of preferences is doing.
It's crossfading any effect you place in
on the wave form on your audio.
But again, I'd leave that at default, five milliseconds,
because ideally you want the effect to start immediately
when you select, this is just a very small buffer,
but it's good that you know what both of those do.
Then under that we've got maximum number
of concurrent file processes.
This is essentially,
how many files Audition can process at once
if you're doing batch processing
or mixing down big multi-track sessions,
you can of course, increase this number,
but 16 is the maximum.
You get a big exclamation mark
and it actually tells you that...
Yeah, that's probably a little bit high.
So 15 is good.
If you notice your version of Audition
or your computer is not handling Audition so well,
you can reduce that
to maybe get some better performance out of it.
And then finally here for the data section,
we've got sample rate conversion.
Again, I generally leave this at 50% pre and post filter.
What this is meaning is when you have audio
of a certain sample rate and it needs to be converted,
how much quality should it retain?
So you can go to a hundred percent,
that's gonna take much longer or 0%.
That's not gonna sound really good
when it does the conversion.
50 is the happy medium
and most users will be quite happy with this.
I would advise leaving it at that as well.
And what this means is
if I create a brand new multi-track session
and we'll call this 48,000,
and then we'll select the sample rate as 48,000.
And then I try and drag in audio of a different sample rate,
this one's recorded at 44100.
It says, okay, the sample rate is different.
Do you wanna convert it?
Yes, and don't show this dialogue again.
Okay, zip is doing the conversion.
You didn't even notice it and...
- [Voiceover] I created this trailer to-
- The audio doesn't really sound any different.
So absolutely fine to leave it as is.
And that's your data section
of the Adobe Audition preferences menu.
But now let's hop back in
and look at effects
because this is a really interesting menu
and it's gonna help you
with a lot of your effects you're using.
First one, open effects settings window when adding effects
to the effects rack.
So that means when I go here
and add an effect
like for instance, amplitude and compression, dynamics...
Boom, it opens the window.
If, of course I untick this in my effects menu,
let's click okay there, do that.
Now, if I add another effect, filter and EQ,
parametric equalizer.
Ah, no window.
I have to double-click to bring that up, okay?
So generally, I'd advise leaving that behavior as ticked,
it's a very handy one.
Restore open effect settings windows when switching files
is pretty much the same
as restore open effect settings windows
when opening sessions, okay?
And what this means is,
if I go into an effect here, dynamics
and I do some crazy stuff with the compressor,
make the threshold minus 60,
and the ratio eight.
When I go over to another file here,
and I wanna go ahead and add another dynamics effect.
You will see that when I open this up...
Boom, I've got everything retained.
Although in this case, it didn't retain it.
And that's probably
because I've unticked the open effect setting windows
when adding to effects rack.
So as long as you've got this it will restore anything
that you've done previously.
Let's go back and show you that again.
So over here, let's add in a dynamics effect
and do a crazy effect.
So let's go into dynamics and we'll open this up,
and we'll go threshold minus 60, ratio eight, like that.
We'll apply that all.
And then we'll go back over here,
just gonna go back into the effects menu
make sure this is ticked and everything is ticked there.
Now we'll go in and add another dynamics effect like that.
And for some reason, it is resetting.
I have no idea why it's doing that
in this particular instance.
It should be restoring the open effect settings
when switching between the files.
And I think actually what that means is that
if I switch back to this,
and I go back in and add in a bit of amplitude
and compression, dynamics, it's still default.
So for some reason, that is not working as it should
in this instance, the same with multi-track,
it should bring back all the settings that you've got.
But perhaps because I applied it
and I didn't close out of the effect,
it hasn't retains them.
So remember by default, you really want these ticked.
For me, it didn't work in the example there,
but generally,
it does retain your effects settings that you have.
But if you always wanna go back to a clean default effect
on any effects rack that you're using, then untick these.
Under here, retain partially process effects data on cancel.
So if you actually cancel out of an effect
and you wanted to retain the effects,
let's actually enable this.
I've got a feeling it's gonna do what I wanted
in the first place.
Let's go into...
It might be because I'm doing it through the effects rack.
Let's go into effects
and let's go to amplitude and compression, dynamics.
And then I'm gonna change things like this.
Close out and then I'm gonna go back in
to effects, amplitude and compression, dynamics.
And yes, the same effects have come back.
Let's actually check on this now, I think
because I'm canceling, not exiting.
Let's go to amplify and let's make this 48 dB, cancel out.
It's still 48 dB.
Again, if I go into amplitude and compression, dynamics,
change this to minus 60 and eight again, close out of it.
Let's cancel out of it.
Go back in to the dynamics, still there.
What if I add a new dynamics effect,
that's going back to the previous settings
that I applied in the effects menu.
So that's how it's retaining.
Anything in the effects menu is retained,
anything in effects rack is not retained in memory.
So good to know when you're ticking all of these.
I'm gonna tick this off.
Process bypass effects during playback.
Okay.
So if I go ahead over here
and I bypass some effects,
if I have that dialogue box ticked under effects
it's going to still process those effects
even though I untick them.
So generally, you want this off
because it takes more of your computer CPU and resources
to process effects.
So you generally want to untick that,
so it's not processing disabled effects.
If you're having like a big problem with your computer,
definitely keep this unticked.
If you want everything processed no matter what, tick this.
But again, I wouldn't really recommend it.
Sort effects menu by vendor and category.
Okay, let's click out of this, click okay.
In effects, we have plugins
and by default is the vendor, waves,
and then the category of effect that we're working with.
But you can do it the other way round in the effects menu
and you can say, "Okay, well, what I'd like you to do,
is I'd like you to show me the category, then the vendor."
So click okay to that, effects.
And now we've got all our different categories of effects,
and then the vendor,
in this case, waves that I'm working with.
Over in effects menu here,
we've also got the preview editor.
This will automatically show the preview editor
when an effect which changes the duration of your audio
is available for preview.
Okay, this is default behavior.
If I went to this audio and I went into effects,
and I went to time and pitch,
stretch and pitch process immediately,
I get a preview window here showing me what's gonna happen
after the effect applies.
However, if I go in and add a compressor by default,
it's not gonna show me the preview window.
The preview window can be handy to see what's happening
to your waveform when you're applying these effects.
So you might want to go into effects
and turn it on completely for every single effect.
And then when I go back into effects,
and I go to amplitude and compression, dynamics...
Boom, I've got that and you can see the rather blocky audio
at the moment.
Let's switch this on, go to default
and you can see exactly what is gonna happen to your audio.
It's gonna be super compressed at the moment
'cause of the settings that I've got.
But of course, this is really helpful
to have this preview window
to see what is happening to your audio
when you're adding any effect to your audio
before you click apply and add it to your audio.
Again, by default, you may well want to leave this
as when an effect which changes the duration is available.
I would actually probably tick it on any effect
'cause then you can really see a before and after view
or if you don't want the preview window at all,
you just untick this completely
and leave it as disabled.
But that is a walkthrough really of the data
and the effects area,
you can see it's quite complex even for me
to get my head around,
but hopefully, you understand it a little bit more
after watching this walkthrough.
And remember, if you wanna understand even more
about Adobe Audition, go over to my courses,
they're open for enrollment right now at mrc.fm/learn,
that's mrc.fm/learn.
And if everything wasn't super clear in this tutorial,
do be sure to leave a comment
and I'll clarify in the comments down below.
(upbeat music)
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