Audacity vs Audition

Battle of the digital audio workshops

- IAN EVENDEN

PODCASTS, EH? We’ve heard of them. If you’re going to start recording your thoughts for posterity and the amusement of your friends, then you’re going to need a couple of things. First is a decent microphone or two, of which there are many out there from brands such as RØDE, Blue, Shure, and Audio-technica. Then you are going to need software to record your podcast and edit it into shape.

There are as many applications made to help with podcasts as there are microphones and subjects to discuss. We’re going to look at two of them here: Audacity, which is a free app created by a team of volunteers and released under the GNU General Public License; and Audition, which is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud and therefore comes with all the benefits and pitfalls of commercially developed software—and the Creative Cloud license in particular, which we’ve discussed before.

Adobe often has a slight advantage when it comes to choosing software because of the dominant position it holds within the creative industry. People who are subscribers to something like Photoshop default to the Adobe solution, but there’s a flourishing ecosystem of free software just an online seach away.