Multi track recorder, or two track editor

Currently I use Reaper for multitrack (or stereo) recording and editing, and Audition only for its tools such as noise reduction.  If Adobe can radically overhaul Audition's multitrack in the next release, and make it significantly less resource hungry I'd reconsider it for all purposes.

Ozpeter, as a lurker on both this and the Adobe Audition U2U forums I've come to respect very greatly the obvious knowledge and experience you and many others have with Audition.  Your mention of Reaper sent me to look at it and yes, I can see it appears a very competent program, to put it at its least.  I have downloaded it and will almost certainly convert my "trial" copy to a fully-functioning one.

However, what I would like to know is what exactly "persuaded" you to move to a different recording host from one with which you have such experience?  Do you mix in Reaper, or is that, at least, still done in AA2?

Thanks for any reply.  I suppose I'm basically very nosey!

My own, personal, view is that Adobe lost the plot.  Actually, I think Syntrillium was losing it before Adobe got involved.  I appreciate that any company has to keep developing a product, even if it is beyond the point where it absolutely necessary, in order to keep sales healthy, but I think Audition is going in the wrong direction. 

IMV, they would have been better to continue development of the basic editing tool and forget about trying to turn it into a multi-track recorder.  Few people actually record multiple tracks in one pass these days and there was already a lot of suitable software available for those who do.

If they had concentrated on the playback (with editing and FX, etc.) of two - and more - audio tracks.  Beefed up the tools in general, really worked on surround sound formats and perhaps, concentrated a little more on the restoration capabilities (which seem to taking a bit of a back seat these days) then they could have marketed it as a stand-alone 'Mastering' software (Damn!, I do hate that term) and sold many units to wannabe mastering engineers - and there are loads of them around, mostly with more money than ability.

I have never really tracked with Audition (or CEP, for that matter).  Every now and then I play around with it, but always end up going back to something which, frankly, works better.

As memory serves me, the Reaper features that really grabbed me initially were automatic crossfades, ripple editing, and markers which remain aligned with the audio when you insert or delete time.  I don't now use Audition's multitrack for any purpose.  BUT - this simply reflects my particular needs.  Others may be totally different.  For instance, Reaper offers nothing at all to the 'restoration' brigade, has few built in effects, no analysis displays and tools, nothing like Audition's frequency space editing, etc etc.  However, it happens that the features that it does have fit my chief needs very closely, and I can call Audition from Reaper (by double-clicking on a clip) if I do need to use Audition's edit view for tasks Reaper cannot accomplish.  In that respect they are complementary rather than competitive.

However, I find it hard to believe that many of Reaper's multitrack editing features would not be greatly appreciated by Audition users and I would very much like to see some of them added to Audition in future releases.  I am also rather taken with the way that Reaper provides quite powerful midi recording and editing facilities together with VSTi support, but you could be forgiven for not knowing that they were there when you first see the gui.  This  too would be a good model if more extensive midi support were to be added to Audition - users not wanting midi need not know that it's there if the gui design is right.  I also have Cubase SX2 but have hardly ever used it as the interface attempts to show all aspects of the program at once, leading to (for me) much confusion and clutter.

Audition's gui is of course far more beautiful to look at, and customisable, than Reaper's, but personally I'm more interested in function than form, so long as the form doesn't detract from function.  Though there are Audition 1.5 and 2.0 'skins' for Reaper, which I think should be taken as a complement to AA!

Though there are Audition 1.5 and 2.0 'skins' for Reaper, which I think should be taken as a complement to AA!

I had noticed that when I checked out the trial after your thread.  Certainly Reaper seems to be an affordable piece of software to compliment Audition.  Cool.

As far as the thread goes, I've used Audition as a multi-track recording environment since CE2000 with all the plugins.  I haven't really had the need or desire to move to anything else.  That might be different if I required midi sequencing.  But if the need ever arises it seems that Reaper would be good for that.