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3D Audio Editing in Audition 2.0

Adobe's Dennis Radeke demos a range of techniques for Frequency Space Editing

By Frank Moldstad

The Frequency Space Editing toolset in Adobe Audition is like a set of Ginzu knives you can slice and dice audio files as finely as you wish. But by combining the Frequency Space Editing tools with Auditions regular audio editing tools, you can practically fricassee your files.

Recently, I wrote a tutorial about how the Frequency Space Editing tools in Adobe Audition could be used to remove a series of squeaks and buzzes from an acoustic guitar track [see it here]. They did an amazing job of carving away the unwanted noises without affecting the material I wanted to keep.

Dennis Radeke

As a followup, now we're going to employ editing tools such as the Amplify and Repair Transient commands and the Noise Reduction tool in the Frequency Space Editing environment. This approach was suggested by Adobes Dennis Radeke, who frequently conducts clinics on Adobe Video Suite applications in his role as a business development manager. Using Adobes Connect application, he set up a live online demo online which allowed me to view his computer screen while he whizzed around Audition.

One of the cool things about Audition 2.0s Frequency Space Editing environment is that its completely integrated into the application you can flip back and forth between the waveform Edit view and the Frequency Space Editing view at will, and apply effects, use editing tools and do nearly anything you can do in the regular Edit mode. The difference is that in the Frequency Space Editing environment, youre looking at the audio by frequencies (a time versus frequency graph) instead of amplitudes as in the waveform view (a time versus amplitude graph).

One way to think of it is that the waveform view is a 2D representation, while the frequency space view is 3D, said Radeke. ?I always represent the Spectral View as being three dimensional, because you do see three dimensions," he said. "You see time and frequency on the X and Y graphs, and then the amplitude is represented by color.

When Audition's traditional editing tools such as Amplify, Repair Transient and Noise Reduction are used in the Frequency Space Editing space, they acquire new powers. For instance, the Amplify command can be used to raise amplitudes of certain frequencies -- or as Radeke pointed out, to lower the amplitude of certain frequencies.

Processing lower amplitude for selected area.

Before our conversation, I had emailed Radeke an MP3 file of the noisy acoustic guitar track I wrote about in the tutorial. I had used the Frequency Space editor's Marquee and Lasso tools to isolate and delete squeaks, buzzes and other unwanted sounds. That worked fine, but as an alternative, the Amplify command with a negative setting might be less noticeable in the soundscape, Radeke noted. Whether or not you hear a dropout in the ambience by cutting an event depends on the size of the space being deleted.

After highlighting a string squeak with the Marquee tool, Radeke accessed the Amplify command [Amplitude>Amplify] and lowered the volume by -75 dB.

"By using a negative value  with the Amplify command, it's almost like you have incredibly fine automation where you can pull the fader down almost to zero for maybe a tenth of a second," he said. "Or, you could take it down -20 dB, so you've nixed it but you've still got some of the ambient noise there."

The great thing about this is the negative amplification affects only the offending frequencies, as opposed to automating the volume in the Edit timeline, which would cause everything in the selected time frame to be muted.