From the course: Audition Essential Training

Understanding the Multitrack Editor - Audition Tutorial

From the course: Audition Essential Training

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Understanding the Multitrack Editor

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- [Instructor] While wave formatter is an important aspect of Audition really I do most of my work using the multi-track editor. In this view, I can add audio files to tracks, mix them together, cut them up move them around and tweak their effects. All without making any permanent changes to the files themselves. The first time you look at the multi-track editor it can be pretty overwhelming with all of its buttons and controls. But it's not so confusing once you get to know it. Firstly, I should say although it may seem like there are a lot of controls on screen each track has identical controls. So the buttons on this track, are the same as this track and the same as this track. As with wav form editor, I can zoom horizontally using the plus key and minus key to zoom out. And if you have a mouse wheel or scroll enabled for your mouse, you can zoom vertically by hovering your mouse over the track area here and holding down the option key or alt on windows and scrolling up and down. You can also zoom horizontally by scrolling your mouse wheel while holding down the command key and that's the control key on Windows. I can also adjust the height of an individual track by going over to the track header over here and clicking and dragging it's lower border. Of if I want my selected track to fill the entire multi-track editor and I can tell that this track is selected because it's a lighter gray. I can then click the zoom selected track button down here or use the keyboard shortcut shift forward slash. And this keyboard shortcut is actually a toggle so if I press shift forward slash again it takes me back to my previous view. The track header is where all of the settings for each track live and I can rename any of these tracks just by clicking the name and typing. So let's call this dialogue and we'll call the next one sound effects number one. I can also rearrange the order of these tracks by clicking the tab to the left of the track header and then dragging up and down. And this blue line here is indicating to me where the track will go when I let go of my mouse button. Across the top of each track are these four buttons M, S, R and I. M is for mute, so if I don't want to hear what's on the track I click M. And S is for solo, so in effect it will mute every other track except for this one. And then I have R which is for record. And I which is for monitor input. And both of these buttons are used for recording in the multi-track editor. Next up, we have what looks like three controls. But it's actually just one and that's the volume of the track. So although all of these clips on the track are set to different levels I can also turn them all up or down by dragging across this control as well. And next to that is the pan control. Since the master output for this session is stereo. I can pan all of these clips on the track to either the left or right speaker. Just the same way that we use the volume controls. So dragging to the left will pan to the left. And dragging to the right will pan to the right. And if you find that this control is not moving fast enough you can hold down the shift control to make it move even faster. You can also get back to the center pan quickly by holding down the option key or alt on Windows and clicking the pan knob. And the same modifier key works for resetting the volume control as well. Underneath this we have our input selection which again refers to recording with the multi-track editor and we also have the output, which is currently set to the master track, but I can also route this to other busses and stems. And you'll also notice at the very bottom of our tracks is the master track. And this where all the other tracks in our session are ultimately being routed to. You can't add any clips to this track and you can't record directly to it either. So if we wanted to adjust the volume of all of these tracks at once you could do it just by adjusting the volume of the master track. So this is just a quick overview of the multi-track editor to help familiarize you with the interface and make it less overwhelming the next time you open a multi-track session.

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