As posted yesterday, I am trying out Adobe’s Audition software for audio editing, in preparing the files from the first episode of our Hero System campaign. Unfortunately, I ran into a frequent crashing problem, simply trying to trim the bulk of the content down. Once imported, it could read and modify the file without any difficulty. But after a few trims, typically 15-30 minutes into editing, Audition would simply lock up, and refuse to respond. An app restart would get things going again, but any edits would be lost, even with the auto-save functionality turned on. As such, from a content trimming perspective, Audition is not an option, at least unless I can fix that particular concern.
Instead, I switched to Audacity, which was a much more streamlined application for the function I was working on. It was workable, but caused different frustrations. Though it never locked up and lost my work, it also doesn’t have any visual indicators for where edits have taken place. As a result, if I was trimming a section, and mis-clicked, I would have to rewind and relocate my starting point again. This added time to an already tedious process. In addition, the ability to fine tune the specific selection window was either limited or unfamiliar to me – it was hard to tweak forward and back the ends of the selection, without large mouse selections. This made it troublesome at time to get specific edits and cuts.
In comparison, I was previously doing this work in Davinci Recode, which was functional and accurate. However, the problem I ran into was memory and processing – since I was working with video files, it constantly was trying to render the cuts, which caused its own delays. In addition, due to the caching process Recode uses, eventually my laptop simply gave “out of memory” errors with a very large volume of edits. In theory, with Audacity and audio only, this would not be an issue.
In truth, once the content length is trimmed appropriately, the mixing and sound correction tools within Audition are superior to the other options I have, so I will no doubt finish the podcast there. But for the bulk of the content trimming, it appears that my go-to currently is Audacity.
