- Hello, I'm Mike Russell, from musicradiocreative.com.
In this mini series,
I'm gonna guide you through some of the best features
in the Preferences menu's of Adobe Audition.
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Many of you have been asking me for this series,
so, I'm gonna take you through
every setting you ever need to know
to get the most out of Adobe Audition.
If you really like what I'm doing,
hit like on this video right now,
also remember to subscribe,
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So, the Preferences menu,
can be seen as quite boring in Adobe Audition,
but very necessary,
to make sure everything functions correctly.
And I wanted to walk you through, in a series videos
what all of these options do.
But let's start in this video with Preferences General,
as there are so many general things,
and I don't think many people actually ever touch
any of these settings,
but if you wanted to know what they all do,
here is the definitive answer.
So, first of all, we'll start at the top
with Zoom Factor, Time.
Well, this is exactly how much your cursor zooms in and out
when you use the scroll wheel on the Timeline bar.
So, 33% is quite acceptable.
If I put it up to 100% and click Okay,
and start zooming in and out on this,
you'll see very, very fast,
it goes in and out of my audio file there.
Back into Preferences,
a shortcut to do that, by the way, on both PC and Mac,
is hit Control and the Comma button on your keyboard.
If we put it down to 2%, really, really tiny, click Okay,
now I try to scroll in with my scroll wheel,
you see, whoa! It's such a tiny small zoom.
So again, back into Preferences General,
33% is about where you want to leave it.
Allow context-sensitive channel editing.
Okay, this is really handy,
particularly if you've used old versions
of Audition or Cool Edit Pro in the past.
This ticked and clicking Okay on a stereo file
means you can go right to the top here,
and work only on the left channel,
or right to the bottom here,
and work only on the right channel,
or in the middle, and of course, select both channels.
With that option switched off, you can cannot do that,
you can only work on one channel.
So, if you do a lot of stereo work from time to time
you might want to enable that feature.
Let's go back in and look at Show HUD
for selection ranges only.
HUD, what is that?
It's this volume control up here.
By Default, it shows all the time wherever you are.
In your Waveform the HUD,
the Heads Ups Display is always there,
and it allows you to change, increase, decrease volume,
just like that.
But sometimes you don't want it there, it's quite annoying,
so, General, Preferences General,
and you want to Show HUD for selection ranges only,
click okay, it disappears,
whenever you select something,
the HUD appears only at that point,
so, that's quite good to know.
Synchronize selection, zoom level and playhead across files
in the Waveform Editor.
While that sounds complicated, it's not that bad though.
Tick it on, and you might wanna use this,
if you do a lot of work with Multi-stems or stemmed audio.
If you're working with music,
and you're trying to copy or paste the same part of a track,
see here, I'm zoomed right out
and I'm selecting around the 22nd mark here in this track.
I also happen to have another audio file open,
and when I go there, you'll see it zoomed out
and I'm selected around the same area.
And if I make this selection bigger, like so, and go back,
you'll see the selection is bigger in this track.
So, you're working with stems,
it can be an excellent thing to have ticked,
otherwise, untick it.
Enable Extensions.
Well, this simply enables any third party extensions
you've installed in Adobe Audition.
Let me give you an example.
If I go into the Window menu and look for my extensions,
I've got the awesome BeatEdit installed and I can use that.
You can also install extensions
from the Adobe Extension Store, the App Store,
and it's all third party stuff.
If you don't want any third party stuff, best disable this.
In your General Preferences, click Okay,
and you'll notice down Window,
Ah! Extensions, there is BeatEdit there,
and it seems to still allow it for the moment,
but of course, with many of these things
if you actually reboot Audition
it will then disable those extensions.
Use hardware acceleration for drawing again or restart
is required for this one.
Generally, leave that ticked.
Don't mess with that,
it's gonna use your computer's hardware
to do all the cool graphics rendering in Audition.
Unless you are having sincere problems
with your graphics and things aren't displaying properly,
you wanna leave that ticked.
If things are not working so well for you, untick it,
or if memory is a problem, untick it,
but generally, leave that ticked.
Now, we move on to the exciting boxes down here.
Default Fade curve type, linear, logarithmic,
is really what you want.
Cosine is different.
Lemme show you how this affects things.
And let's actually go into the Multitrack to do this.
Now, in Multitrack, you can make crossfades,
as you can see I've done here, two different crossfades.
By Default, if I edit and I fade one track over the other
you get this nice even curve.
But if I go into My Preferences and say,
I want the Cosine S-curve instead,
now, when I do a crossfade in Multitrack
I get this kinda -Sy kinda curve,
which is just slightly different,
as you can see from the examples I did earlier.
But again, for most people
you'll want to leave that for Default.
Click Okay, back into the Waveform View,
and we'll look again.
Now, we've got Editor panel, Context clicking.
So, Context menu, you Shift and click to extend selection.
So, what it's saying is, if I right click,
I get the Context menu in Editor, like that.
I'm right clicking getting that.
If I'm selecting, I'm getting a selection,
if I hit Shift,
I can extend the selection on either side like that.
Let go of Shift and it just lets go of the Selection.
So, that's Default behavior,
however, if I change this over to Extend Selection,
and Control for Context menu,
you'll notice that I can select something,
then I can right click to the right
and extend right click to the left,
and extend a Context menu.
No Context menu whatsoever,
if I need a Context menu, I hit Control or Command on Mac
and I get my Context menu back.
But again, by Default, generally, I leave this as is.
It really depends what you are happy working with.
Spectral Circular Brush Clicking.
Create a circular selection on mouse down
or place the playhead on mouse down.
Generally, you want to leave this
as place the playhead on mouse down,
hold for a circular selection,
so, that's Default behavior.
And this is in our Spectral View here, up here
or Shift indeed to Access Spectral.
So, if I select now, it's just gonna move the cursor around,
but if I select and hold, there's my selection, okay?
If I go and change this behavior
to create a circular selection on mouse down,
immediately, the moment I mouse down,
it's starting to select things, okay?
So, that's worth to bear in mind depending on the behavior,
but generally place the play head on mouse down
is what you want.
Finally, or penultimate I should say, mouse will zoom.
Zoom at mouse position,
hold control over timeline to zoom at playhead.
Okay, so basically what this means is,
when I zoom on a track it will zoom to
wherever I am on the Time bar up here,
using my scroll wheel on my mouse.
However, if I want to zoom to the playhead,
I could hold down Control or Command,
and it will always zoom to my playhead.
I can reverse this behavior
by simply changing this over, clicking Okay,
and now, wherever I click on the timeline
it's always gonna zoom to my playhead,
and if I hold down Control,
it will then zoom to the place where my cursor is
on the playhead.
Let's put that back, click Okay.
And the final thing to show you
is reset or warning dialogues inside General.
And what this will do,
if you've ever had a warning dialogue in Audition
like, when you save an MP3 file and it says,
this is a lossy file format, never show this again.
It will never show it again,
but if you reset, then those dial boxes will appear.
This can be quite handy.
Sometimes Audition will asks you for Default Behavior
when you're doing things,
like for instance, dragging stuff into the Multitrack.
Lemme give you a quick example.
Let's zoom right out, delete all of this.
If I go ahead and try and pull in two files,
it'll try and pull them onto the same track.
Now, I really want them to go on different tracks,
and there is a dialogue box that asks me
how I want this behavior to be.
If I wanted to change that reset or warning dialogues,
click Yes, click Okay,
and now try and drag these in and it will do that,
but it'll come up with, what do you wanna do?
And I'll say place each file onto its own track.
So, if I ever made a mistake
and I wanted to reconfirm a different behavior,
I can then change that
just in the General part of the Preferences menu
by resetting all my warning dialogues.
But then everything's reset,
so, you have to then say,
don't show this again in the future,
for any warning dialogues, you do not want to appear.
And that is General section of Preferences in a nutshell.
Like I say, subscribe to my channel,
because I'll be going through the rest
of the Preferences menu.
There are so many of them that you can tweak and customize
to make Audition really perform at its best.
And if you want to learn more about Adobe Audition,
I'd love it if you join me on my course.
Enrollment is open now,
I have many courses for audio producers, podcast producers
live streamers as well, all at mrc.fm/learn.
That's mrc.fm/learn.
Any questions at all, lemme know in the comments down below.
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