Adobe Audition
A professional audio workstation for recording, editing, and mixing voice tracks
Overview
Adobe Audition is a professional digital audio workstation widely used for voiceover recording, editing, and post-production. It offers both destructive and non-destructive editing workflows with powerful noise reduction and restoration tools.
Voice actors use Audition for recording sessions, editing out mistakes, applying noise reduction, normalizing levels, and exporting files to client specifications. The spectral frequency display is particularly useful for cleaning audio.
How It Works
Audition is a standard tool in many professional VO studios and is valued for its reliability and integration with other Adobe Creative Cloud applications. It handles everything from quick edits to complex multi-track projects.
Adobe Audition is available through Adobe Creative Cloud at approximately $23 per month as a standalone subscription. It is also included in the full Creative Cloud bundle.
Who Uses It
A professional-grade option for voice actors who want industry-standard editing capabilities. The subscription cost is justified if you use it daily, but lighter users may prefer a one-time-purchase alternative.
Pricing & Plans
Adobe Audition is available exclusively through Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions. The standalone Audition subscription costs approximately $22.99 per month when billed monthly, or $20.99 per month with an annual commitment. It is also included in the full Creative Cloud All Apps plan at approximately $59.99 per month, which bundles Audition with Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and dozens of other Adobe applications. Adobe frequently offers promotional pricing for new subscribers, with first-year discounts that can reduce the monthly cost by 40-60% during promotional periods. Student and teacher pricing is available at approximately $19.99 per month for the All Apps plan with valid educational credentials. The ongoing subscription model means you pay for the software continuously — over several years, the cumulative cost far exceeds what you would pay for a one-time purchase alternative, though you receive continuous updates and new features in return. There is no permanent license option, and cancelling your subscription means losing access to the software entirely.
Pros & Cons
What's Great
Adobe Audition's spectral frequency display is one of the most powerful audio cleanup tools available to voice actors, allowing you to visually identify and surgically remove specific unwanted sounds — mouth clicks, breaths, room noise, and electrical hum — with precision that waveform-only editors cannot match. The destructive and non-destructive editing workflows provide maximum flexibility, letting you choose between permanent edits for quick processing and non-destructive effects chains for complex projects where you want to adjust processing at any point. The noise reduction suite is among the best available in any audio editor, with adaptive noise reduction, de-clipping, de-hum, and de-reverb tools that can rescue recordings that would be unusable in less capable software. Multi-track editing support makes Audition suitable for complex voiceover productions involving multiple takes, music beds, sound effects, and layered audio, expanding its utility beyond simple voice editing. Tight integration with Adobe Premiere Pro through Dynamic Link allows voice actors who also do video work to move seamlessly between audio and video editing environments. The software's batch processing capabilities are robust, allowing you to apply consistent processing chains across hundreds of files automatically, which is invaluable for large audiobook projects or e-learning courses with dozens of modules.
What Could Be Better
The ongoing subscription cost of $23 per month adds up to approximately $276 per year, which is a significant recurring expense for freelance voice actors, particularly those who do not use the software daily or who only need basic editing capabilities that cheaper alternatives provide equally well. The learning curve is steeper than simplified editors like Twisted Wave or Audacity, with a complex interface that presents dozens of tools and features that most voice actors will never use, creating unnecessary cognitive overhead during day-to-day editing tasks. Adobe's subscription model means you are locked into ongoing payments with no ownership — if you cancel, you lose access to your projects and workflow, which creates vendor dependency that some professionals find unacceptable. The software is resource-intensive compared to lighter alternatives, requiring more RAM, processing power, and disk space, which can cause performance issues on older computers or budget laptops. Adobe's frequent updates, while generally beneficial, occasionally introduce bugs or interface changes that disrupt established workflows, and the forced update cycle means you cannot remain on a stable version indefinitely. The all-in-one design means you are paying for music production, podcast editing, and broadcast features that voice actors typically do not need, effectively subsidizing functionality that adds complexity without value for your specific use case.
Our Recommendation
Adobe Audition is recommended for professional voice actors who edit audio daily, work on complex multi-track projects, and need the advanced restoration and processing tools that justify the ongoing subscription cost. It is the right choice if you regularly encounter technically challenging audio that requires spectral editing, advanced noise reduction, or batch processing across large numbers of files. Voice actors who primarily do simple record-edit-export workflows for commercial spots, narration, and e-learning will find Audition overkill for their needs and should consider Twisted Wave or Audacity as more cost-effective and user-friendly alternatives. If you already subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud for other applications like Photoshop or Premiere Pro, adding Audition through the All Apps plan provides excellent incremental value. New voice actors should start with free tools like Audacity to learn fundamental editing skills before investing in Audition, as the basic concepts transfer between applications and you will appreciate Audition's advanced features more once you understand what simpler tools cannot do.
Pro Tips
Create a custom workspace layout in Audition that displays only the panels and tools you use for voiceover editing, hiding the music production and broadcast features that clutter the interface and slow down your workflow. Build an effects rack preset with your standard processing chain — noise reduction, EQ, compression, normalization — and save it so you can apply consistent processing to every recording with a single click rather than manually configuring each effect every time. Learn to use the spectral frequency display for mouth click and breath removal, as this technique alone justifies the subscription cost for many voice actors and produces cleaner audio than any automated tool can achieve. Set up keyboard shortcuts for your most common operations and invest time in learning them until they become muscle memory, as Audition's extensive shortcut system can cut your editing time in half once you stop reaching for the mouse. Use the Favorites panel to save your most-used effects and processes for instant access, and create separate favorites for different project types — commercial, narration, audiobook — so you can switch between optimized workflows quickly.