Adobe Audition Part Of A DAW

I was inspired by this post by beetle and thought it might merit a seprate discussion.

The majority of problems I see with the program are indeed ASIO and recources.  For the issue of recources, Adobe tries to make it very clear to the buyer about the system requierments before they purchase.   True, in the past, you could throw Cool Edit Audition on any 'ol machine and it would work well.  Now, the more sophisticated these programs become, the more they demand from the hardware.

The more I think of your comment, the more it is becoming apparent that Audition is joining the ranks of the other professional audio software like Cubase and Albeton, which is a good thing. In other words, Audition is becoming a pro studio software that would be part of a DAW. A Digital Audio Workstation, a PC that is used only for recording and production and nothing else, even without internet connection. In that situation I should think that resources problems would become moot. If Cool Edit was an easy-to-use entry level audio software used by many, though not exclusively, hobbyists and career beginners -- Adobe Audition is not that any longer. It should also mean that the user base will widen to include many more musicians and recording studio pros. This can only be a good thing.

Yep, good call, Bernie.
For all the "It ain't what it used to be" sentiment I've seen, it has cetainly got to be looking more and more attractive for pro studios now.
On this note, I have an anecdote to share, which anyone who's been following the "Audition/ProFools" thread (sorry, don't remember the exact thread title) will find amusing.
I was recently put in touch with a small video/audio post production house. They have a telephone hybrid which outputs all these nasty overtones.
The facility has a major client for whom they record telephone interviews, and the client has been bitching about the audio quality. They (the client) have even taken the finished product to another audio post firm to have the calls "cleaned up".
I asked the facility owner to send me a 30 sec snippet of one of the calls. I used spectral view and the notch filter to remove all of the offending overtones. The facility owner was naturally blown away with my results. So, he calls me up and says "Would you mind coming in and showing my audio guy how you did it, so we can save it as a preset in ProFools for future use?"
I said "Sure, I'll come in, but I'm not guaranteeing that PF will be able to do as good a job."
Sure enough, I get there, and they're running PF LE (that's the light edition, for those who aren't sure), which has nowhere near the tools to do the job.
So, he asks me what I used.
I tell him and explain that it's a Windows only solution, and XP at that.
He doesn't have a Windows box running XP yet, so he's actually going to upgrade one of his office PC's to XP, just so he can buy AA2.0, just so he can have the notch filtering and spectral view tools, just so he can remove these overtones for one client!!!
On top of this, he plays me one of the "cleaned up" versions supplied by the other post house, and I could still hear the overtones! And they charged heaps more than me. I joked with the facility owner that I wasn't charging him enough.
Laugh? I almost shat.
No, seriously, I was very diplomatic in not bagging the crap out of his PF "investment". And in his defence, no, PF LE isn't the core of his business. He's using Media100, and just has PF LE for "special" audio needs.
But the more we can spread the word like this, the better IMHO.

I was inspired by this post by beetle and thought it might merit a seprate discussion.

The majority of problems I see with the program are indeed ASIO and recources.  For the issue of recources, Adobe tries to make it very clear to the buyer about the system requierments before they purchase.   True, in the past, you could throw Cool Edit Audition on any 'ol machine and it would work well.  Now, the more sophisticated these programs become, the more they demand from the hardware.

The more I think of your comment, the more it is becoming apparent that Audition is joining the ranks of the other professional audio software like Cubase and Albeton, which is a good thing. In other words, Audition is becoming a pro studio software that would be part of a DAW. A Digital Audio Workstation, a PC that is used only for recording and production and nothing else, even without internet connection. In that situation I should think that resources problems would become moot. If Cool Edit was an easy-to-use entry level audio software used by many, though not exclusively, hobbyists and career beginners -- Adobe Audition is not that any longer. It should also mean that the user base will widen to include many more musicians and recording studio pros. This can only be a good thing.

 Exactly my point!  Thanks for pointing it out.  And, the cool thing is that it can still be used as it always has by many semi-pros and amatures.  You just need more RAM and powerful processing.  

I have no functional problems with ASIO and my E-mu card, except that it's slow, and loading up the demo resets the dafaults for the sudio hardware.  This has been addressed elsewhere.

I don't have the most powerful computer in the world, but all I need is at least a gig of RAM to be super happy.

I have a quite fast computer, and, when utilizing "powerful processing" (in my case, realtime effects) Audition's performance is very poor compared to Sonar 4.  

So the "Audition doesn't work well because people need upgrade their computers" does not apply to me.

Would partitioning the hard drive improve performance? Splitting the hard drive into two and putting only Audition and your music and audio files and session files on one drive, and everything else on the other. If it makes real sense to do this I might look it into it. Imagine booting up to a drive that just has Audition on it, whenever you want, and still have everything else on the machine.

Would partitioning the hard drive improve performance? Splitting the hard drive into two and putting only Audition and your music and audio files and session files on one drive, and everything else on the other.

But then you are not putting everything on "one drive" and other things on "the other" drive. They would not be drives, they would be two partitions on the *same* drive. Partition 1 would be at the start of the drive and partition 2 from somewhere in the middle to the end. So the heads would have to travel all over the place going from one partition to another and I think that would decrease rather than increase performance. What one needs is two separate hard drives, the OS on a smaller boot drive with the the Audition program on that and then all the data files on drive 2. That's as I understand drives and partitions anyway - I may be wrong. And it still doesn't answer the question: with two hard drives, where's the best place to put the Audition caches and temporary folders - drive 1 or drive 2?

What one needs is two separate hard drives, the OS on a smaller boot drive with the the Audition program on that and then all the data files on drive 2. That's as I understand drives and partitions anyway - I may be wrong. And it still doesn't answer the question: with two hard drives, where's the best place to put the Audition caches and temporary folders - drive 1 or drive 2?

You got it right.  As for temp files, you have less risk of a glitch if they're on the data drive; no pops or anything if windows makes a page call while recording the temp file.  But your transfer from "temp" to "real file" will be faster if the temp file is on the system drive.  I've never had a glitch, since I only ever record stereo in audition - so I use the system drive.

Would partitioning the hard drive improve performance? .

probably not  using multiple drives is not exactly the issue it was ten years ago.  Win OS/bios transfer of info from processer to drive has had improved performance

if you are pressing to the limits of OS/drive performance there are various strategies for improving operation . .  . but as a rule they are system specific (even the adage of defragment defragment defragment has become more of an open question with NTFS drives . . . ) but in any case partitioning a drive, generally speaking, is unlikely to improve the real time performance of streaming data

the difficulties that some users are experiencing with new code Audition stems, I think, from device (audio card/display/network card) drivers, ASIO implementation in Audition and elements that are specific to individual systems.  IRQ assignment can be critical, perhaps even more critical in V2 then 1 or 1.5, and IRQ assignment is not particularly easy to manage in XP.

One of the difficulties I experienced with my first experiment with V2 was that the system used was not a 'pure' audio box.  It was a Vid editing bay and it's optimization was a compromise among network/video/audio.  As I used AA for a lot of the vid work it seemed like a good box to start with but the shift from temp files to direct to drive recording is enough of a change that the old compromises were now, perhaps, not merely ineffective but counter productive.  

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generally speaking you not only want the data going to a seperate drive but through a seperate IDE bus.  The data drive (if internal) should be primary device on 2nd bus, not slave on boot drive bus.  And the characteristics of the primary drive on the bus will be the functional limits of that bus (roughly speaking you wont get 15k rpm seek time from a drive slaved to a 4200 rpm master)

but strategies for setting up system is not somthing to do piece meal ad hoc . . . in truth that tends to be the way we got to stable functional systems, but the point is if intersection of AA and system is not producing performance you expect and the gear is relatively recent vintage, it's unlikely that you're going to find a single quick fix.  Even after 4+ yrs there are still XP driver issues with network/display/audio cards . . .  in my V2 experiment I tried three (the only 3 XP flavors) different drivers for the  primarily audio card . . . and had slightly different performance and issues with each of the drivers.  (middle one tends to be most stable, and if used a a solitary card probably the best . . .  the WDM drivers of that version combined with ASIO4ALL probably produced the best average performance once I also made some adjustments to signal routing (my testes were with 13 simultaneous inputs + 3 monitor mixes (and threw in a full reverb stressor on  the CPU) for both analog and digital data

anyway it's unlikely that partitioning the drives (unless creating a FAT32 partition which is defragged after every session would actually improve performance) would make much of difference with Euphony's issues.

... my testes were with 13 simultaneous inputs...

My eyes water at the very thought.