I can’t help thinking that Adobe isn’t giving audio as much attention as it might.

More specifically, the software giant is not giving its audio products as much attention as it should.

Adobe makes a lot of software, and much of it is available to subscribers of their Creative Cloud bundle. I’ve been paying for it for years. In part because I organise my photos with Lightroom Classic, but also because I use Photoshop a bit, I occasionally dabble with After Effects and I use Premiere Pro. And then there’s Adobe’s main audio product – Audition.

Audition actually began life as a program called Cool Edit, and I used that a bit when I worked at Virgin Radio – specifically Cool Edit Pro 2. On underpowered PCs not really designed for much more than running Microsoft Office products, it could be a liability. I remember one colleague working late into the night because a piece of audio he was making for one of our stations was a complex multitrack thing, and the program crashed taking all his hard work with him.

Anyway, Adobe bought the product in 2003 and rebranded it as Audition. Then, when the Creative Cloud came along, it began to be bundled in. Because I’d used it under one guise or another for many years, and it was bundled into the Creative Cloud suite, I’ve been regularly used Audition for my work on The Cycling Podcast as one of their producers.

But in recent years, while the audio landscape has moved along, and the podcast landscape has developed, it doesn’t feel that Audition has moved with the times. Adobe has become very focused on AI, as many companies have. But somehow, that hasn’t extended to Audition.

Look at rival software, Descript. It’s a different beast in that it is much more targeted specifically at podcast creators, whereas Audition has functionality for all kinds of audio production, but Descript has killer features like providing automated transcripts of recordings, the removal of silences and filler words like “um.” This lets you do text-based audio editing. The software is cloud based, which isn’t necessarily the best thing at all times (I’ve done audio editing in some unusual places, and they don’t all have solid internet connections). But this means that making a short edit of a long interview is vastly quicker to do.

In Descript, you just edit the words like you would in a word processor, removing words, lines or whole paragraphs; shifting sentences around. And the audio just follows! You might still want to do some tidying up, but you’re a long way there.

You can’t do any of this in Audition.

In 2023 I attended the London edition of Adobe Max where they were showing off the then latest and greatest functions of Adobe Firefly, their AI tool that is to be found in products like Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere Pro. After the main presentation in which Audition had basically not been mentioned, I asked one the Adobe reps what was happening with Audition, and he frankly told me that the other products were priorities.

In fact, Adobe does have a lot of fancy new AI audio functionality. But essentially none of it has found its way to Audition!

They have some really smart tools available online, some freely, and others to Adobe Creative Cloud members. Best known and probably most widely used is their excellent Speech Enhancement tool. Currently on version 2, this has come on leaps and bounds since it first launched. Essentially, you upload some bad audio of speech – perhaps there’s background noise, or the recording of the speech was just poor. The tool does a great job cleaning it up. There are two sliders that let you dial in the amount of enhancement you want, and also how much background noise you want to keep. Less tends to be more with these things, but it’s an excellent tool that I use regularly.

But it’s not built into Audition in any manner at all!

If I want to use it, I have to take the raw audio, clean it up online, and then import, or re-import it into Audition!

There are also tools to check your microphone, and one to help you create audio in a browser utilising their enhancement technology.

But the other key audio tools are to be found in their video editing software, Premiere Pro. There you can now perform text based editing, remove silences and filler words, just like Descript. While the tutorials would have you think these are video-only tools, they work perfectly well with audio.

Recently, with a project where I wanted to edit some long interviews via text, I found myself creating a video project in Premiere, uploading my audio, getting it transcribed including identifying the two speakers (it works really well and you end up with something a little like a “script”), editing it, and sending that audio over to Audition to finish up the edit.

Premiere Pro also has Adobe’s enhancement tool built in, as well as other AI functionality that lets you improve your recorded audio.

None of this functionality is in Audition!

Look, I get it. Coding resources are limited, and Adobe has been making great leaps in things like using AI to make perfect object selections in Photoshop, create new images in Adobe Express, or extend video beyond what was shot in Premiere Pro with additional AI generated frames. All of these take considerable resources to develop. But Adobe is clearly prioritising video production and trying to persuade TikTok-ers to move up from CapCut to their product and not the free Davinci Resolve.

However, Adobe already has done the legwork to enhance audio and create transcriptions. It just needs to implement it’s new audio functionality in its actual audio product.

My suspicion is that the foundations of Audition are a bit flaky in 2025, and are perhaps still built on some of that old Cool Edit code base. But Adobe is unquestionably falling behind in the audio production world, as tools like Descript or even some of the remote recording services like Riverside or Zencastr add functionality. Even Dropbox will transcribe my audio! (Badly, as it turns out).

I’m also aware that there are probably more potential users of photo and video products in 2025 than there are audio-only products. But even Premiere Pro users who are serious about their audio quality, finish up mastering in audio-only software – you can take projects back and forth between Premiere and Audition.

Maybe Adobe’s ultimate aim is to have a single product – Premiere Pro – that can be used for both audio and video editing?