Labelling and saving your work
I cannot stress enough the need to save your work in the right place and label it clearly. If you don’t do this it will get lost.

In my USB stick I have four folders:

1. For edit audio
2. Original audio
3. Final audio
4. Sessions

I save my sessions in the one that is called ‘Sessions’. I put a clean copy of audio in ‘Original audio’ (which will never be edited), a copy to edit in ‘For edit audio’ and any final WAV/MP3 files in ‘Final audio’.

IT IS VITAL THAT YOU ONLY PUT AUDIO TO BE EDITED IN FOR EDIT. If you import audio from original into your sessions you will lose the original as you edit it.

Opening Adobe Audition and creating a session

When you open Adobe Audition, there are two viewing windows – Multitrack and Edit.
Multitrack is to open and place your audio. Once you have more than one bits of audio you will be working in this window.
Edit is for editing your individual bits of audio.

The first thing you need to do is create a session. In the multitrack window click on ‘File’ at the top left and go down to ‘save session as’. Click on it and name your session and then save it in the sessions folder on your USB/hard drive. When you close your session you will need to save it. Always click on ‘save all’ or ‘save session’ before you close. When you come to reopen your session, go into Adobe Audition and in the multitrack window, click on file at the top left and open session. Search in your sessions folder and click on the correct session.

Loading in audio
In the multitrack window, there’s a box on the left which says ‘Files’ on it. Just inside this box on the left is a folder icon, which if you stick your mouse over it says ‘import files’. If you click on this you can find your audio in your ‘For edit audio’ folder of your USB stick/hard drive. REMEMBER to always load in audio from ‘For edit audio’ and to have an original copy in your ‘Original audio’ folder. Once you start working on your audio in Adobe Audition it makes permanent changes to it. You can load in multiple tracks at once.

When the audio is listed down the left hand side of that box, all you need to do is left click on it and then drag it into the multitrack view to see it in wave form.

To highlight a piece of audio within multitrack left click on it. This turns it dark green and makes it the piece of audio you are dealing with. If you right click on the audio it turns it green and if you hold the right click down you can move the audio around. If you double left click on the audio in multitrack it will take it into the edit window. You can also take a piece of audio into the edit window by highlighting it (single left click) and then clicking on the Edit window icon at the top left of the screen.

Editing
Once your audio is in the edit window you can edit it. Left click where you want to start your edit and drag the mouse to where you want to end the edit. When you are editing use both your EARS and your EYES – you can often see an edit as much as you can hear it because of the waveforms patterns created by human speech. The aim is to make your piece sound like normal speech so that a listener cannot tell it is edited. REMEMBER to leave in breaths – it sounds extremely unnatural to remove breathing – your piece will sound edited if you do that.

You cannot edit when your audio is paused – it must be stopped.

To cut and copy highlight a section.
CTRL + C = copy
CTRL + V = paste
CTRL + X = copy and cut at the same time.

At the bottom of the screen is a zoom box. If you press + you zoom in, – zooms out. It is often useful to zoom right in when editing to get a really precise edit (ie one that you can’t hear.)

When you click back onto your multitrack screen, the changes you have made to your edit will appear. It is worth saving your session regularly. It will ask you if you want to save changes to all audio – say yes. Don’t worry if you get a message about loss of quality due to compression – it is fine.

Saving your final audio
When you have finished your work and are ready to mix it:
1. go into multitrack.
2. click on edit at the top left of the screen and scroll down to ‘Mixdown to new file’
3. Pick the ‘Master Output in Session Stereo’ option.
4. It will create a ‘mixdown’
5. Save that mixdown by clicking on it to take it into an edit screen (it may do that for your automatically). Go to ‘edit’ at the top left and then ‘save as’ and save it in the format you want (MP3 or Windows PCM Wav file) in your ‘Final audio’ file.
6. Save the session again to save all changes.