Hi, I’m looking for a replacement for Adobe Audition. I’ve used audition for the past 6 years to mix audio for my music videos (solo piano), but I refuse to pay a subscription. I’ve already cut ties with Adobe.
My typical workflow is to record solo piano into a digital recorder (Zoom H6) using multiple mics. I would load those wave files into Audition and mix them down to a stereo channel, applying a number of effects such as a multi-band compressor and reverb.
I’ve just started looking at trial versions of Cubase Pro (and WaveLab Pro), but neither seem to be a good fit. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.
[Edit: I should clarify: I record music videos so the audio and video need to sync up. I usually record things in complete takes, recording both video and audio at the same time. So recording a few measures here and there, recording just one verse, doesn’t really fit into my workflow.]
Cubase Pro should be a good fit for everything but creating the final video file.
You can record or import multi-mic recordings and work on them simultaneously. (See: Folder Track → Group Editing, and phase-coherency)
You can import the video into Cubase as well on a Video Track.
While Cubase can export a video file it does not let you chose any options/parameters. Instead it will always go big resolution resulting in big files. So you would need any video editor to create the final video file.
Thank you for that reply. I record video with three separate cameras, and will be using Davinci Resolve for the video editing portion (replacing Adobe Premiere).
Are there any good tutorials on doing what you’ve described? Cubase is a huge program, and right now, it’s quite overwhelming. It comes across as sort of expecting that your music will adhere to a strict tempo, and that you will record bits and pieces and move them around on the grid, snapping to measures and such. I may work that way sometime in the future, but right now, I start with a complete audio take of a piece and mix from there. There is no holding to a click track.
How easy is it to pull in alternate takes and “cut and paste” bits of audio to repair mistakes, etc.?
Does Cubase have a good multiband compressor for mastering?
From the top of my head I would not know a good tutorial video entirely specific to your case.
If you start with a clean project, you first need to set up the correct sample rate. Chose any but you need to stick with it. You should not mix or change sample rates mid project.
Then it would be creating a video track, a folder track and inside that folder track as many audio tracks as you have microphones.
For live recordings you’d need to go to Audio Connections, create Input Busses there and instruct the busses to get their signal from the respective channel from your audio interface.
Cubase allows you to not work with a musical grid but on a linear time scale instead. Cubase’s bigger sibling Nuendo is used by many professionals in post production this way. Your search key words would be “set track to linear time base” and “set ruler to time code”.
Well, for me it is super easy as that is a bread and butter job of any DAW. You might have to get used to it, though. Video editing software and DAWs look alike at first glance but there are fundamental differences between them.
Cubase Pro has a 4-band compressor, a 3-band up/down compressor, and some other multi-band effects that can help when mastering.
Whether you describe them as good is depending on you. There are dozends of 3rd party compressor available. The reason is that different people like different things about each compressor.
I’d say the stock plugins of Cubase Pro will generally get you very far. For anything else there are 3rd party plugins.
If you are moving from Adobe to Davinci Resolve… Fairlight (Audio page of davinci) is better than Audition and could be enough for your projects. Not as perfect as Cubase (my best daw in the world), but very handy.
Yeah I’ve looked at Fairlight, and I used it in one project. I don’t think it provides the editing features you can do in Audition (cut and paste from one sample / wav to another). Another feature I liked to use in Audition was the phase analysis graph. Does Cubase or WaveLab have anything like that?
However, there is no tool with a “fix phase issues” button. In a DAW you are supposed to know what you are doing, ie. how to fix phase issues yourself.
This isn’t a Resolve discussion, but, FWIW, I think the way to do this in Resolve would be to not do it in the Fairlight tab but in the Edit tab, doing the copying and pasting just like you would with video clips. (I haven’t used the Fairlight section all that much in my music video editing, though I do use it for adding plugins on my live performance videos.)
I definitely second that notion, though I suggest the full year all-access pass. In particular, while the new Cubase tutorials on there are useful, they mostly tend to cover what is new.
When I was first starting up with Cubase (and after reading the entire PDF manual, but absorbing only small fractions of it), I found that going back to older Groove 3 tutorials introduced me to features that I thought were missing (I’d moved over from SONAR) because Cubase is so deep, and sometimes the names of features are so obscure (and far from intuitive for people used to other DAWs and who came up through physical recording with mixers and tape) that it is hard to just search for what you need. I remember finding that one key missing feature (I think it’s called something like the in-place key editor – SONAR called it the track piano roll view, I think – “key editor” itself was an unintuitive name for me since all other DAWs I’d worked with previously used the “piano roll” term, assumedly since it kind of looks like a player piano roll with the dashes for notes) from a Groove 3 course on an ancient version of Cubase (maybe Cubase 5? – I only started Cubase at 9.5). I just binged on all the Cubase tutorials I could find there (and there are quite a few), and that helped immensely.
For this, VEGAS is your best bet. Easy to use, compatible with VST2 and 3 plugins and OFX video fx. Basic audio mixing functions with sends and inserts, buses.
Unless you want side-chaining.
Well, no, not really. What I want is an app that allow me to master my piano recordings. I’m not interested in a traditional DAW like Cubase. Adobe Audition may have have DAW features, but that’s not how I was using it. I record solo piano videos, capturing video on several cameras and capturing multiple mic pairs into my Zoom H6 recorder. I take the two stereo wav files (one for each pair of mics) and edit any problems and add effects such as multi band compressor and reverb. I also correct levels and panning. As I continue to dive into the features in WaveLab, its starting to look like a perfect fit for my workflow.
Yeah then, Wavelab is exactly what you want. But your posts here have implied you additionally wanted some DAW-ish features. If not, Wavelab is the way to go.
