Download Adobe Audition for macOS

Adobe Audition is a multitrack audio workstation for macOS built for recording, editing and restoring sound. The current version keeps the toolset editors rely on — the Essential Sound panel, spectral frequency display and real-time effects processing — while Apple Silicon support remains standard.

• Over 50 built-in effects, from compression and reverb to de-essing and noise reduction.
• Spectral frequency display for surgically removing hums, clicks and background chatter.
• Essential Sound panel that groups dialogue, music and ambience controls in one strip.
• Real-time clip effects and automation for recording sessions with processing already in place.
• Automatic remixing that shortens a music track to a set duration without audible cuts.
• Multitrack and waveform views kept separate for quick switching between layout and cleanup.

The feature set that producers lean on — spectral cleanup, multitrack sessions and the Essential Sound panel — remains in place. What shifts is refinement under the hood, so the tools feel familiar while playback and rendering stay snappy on current macOS releases.

Drag a field recording into track one

You open Audition to a blank multitrack view — dark grey timeline, transport controls sitting top-left, no clips yet. The first thing you do is drag a field recording into track one. It's a twenty-minute interview captured in a café, and the background hiss is immediate through headphones.

You double-click the clip. The waveform editor opens with its familiar green-on-black display. Instead of reaching for a noise-reduction preset, you highlight a quiet two-second stretch where only the café hum is audible. Right-click, Capture Noise Print. Then you select the whole file, open Effects > Noise Reduction (process), and dial the reduction slider to 12 dB. The preview button lets you toggle between before and after — the hum drops away without making the voice sound underwater.

Back in multitrack, you spot a chair scrape right in the middle of a sentence. You hit the Spectral Frequency Display button. The waveform splits into a heat map — low frequencies down the bottom, highs up top. The scrape shows as a bright orange smudge around 200 Hz lasting half a second. You grab the spot healing brush, paint over it, and the smudge dissolves. The voice underneath stays intact.

Track two gets a music bed. You drag in a three-minute instrumental and open the Essential Sound panel. The clip is tagged as Music, then you enable Remix and type "0:47" as the target duration. Audition analyses the waveform, finds natural phrase boundaries, and stitches a clean 47-second version. No crossfade artefacts, no sudden jumps.

On the dialogue track you open the Essential Sound panel again, this time switching the clip type to Dialogue. The loudness auto-match brings the speech to -23 LUFS. One click on the Repair tab, and the DeNoise and DeReverb sliders are ready if the café ambience needs taming further.

Finally you add a shared reverb on a bus track — light room ambience to tie the voice and music together — then export the whole session as a 48 kHz WAV. The entire cleanup, remix and level-match took under ten minutes.

Runs natively on Apple Silicon

Will it run on Apple Silicon natively? Yes. The current build includes ARM support, so M1, M2, M3 and M4 machines run it without Rosetta translation. You'll see snappier waveform redraws and faster effect renders on Apple Silicon than on older Intel Macs.

Does the Essential Sound panel replace the need for plug-ins? Not entirely, but it covers the most common chores. Dialogue loudness matching, noise reduction, reverb cleanup and music ducking all live inside that one panel. For surgical EQ or character compression, you'll still reach for the parametric EQ or a third-party plug-in, but day-to-day broadcast prep becomes a one-panel job.

Can I record multiple microphones at once? Yes. The multitrack view handles as many inputs as your audio interface provides. You can arm several tracks simultaneously, apply real-time effects during recording, and write volume automation as you go. Podcasters with two or three hosts will find it straightforward — just assign each mic to its own track and hit record.

What does the spectral display actually help with? Think of it as an X-ray for audio. Where the waveform shows amplitude over time, the spectral view adds frequency as the vertical axis, and brightness represents loudness. A mouth click, a mobile phone interference buzz, or a sibilant whistle becomes a visible shape you can isolate and remove without touching the surrounding audio.

Is it heavy on system resources? Multitrack sessions with dozens of clips and real-time effects will use RAM and CPU, as any DAW does. On machines with 16 GB of RAM or more, a typical podcast or music session runs smoothly. Closing unused panels and freezing tracks with heavy effect chains keeps things snappy on lower-spec Macs.

Capture a noise print before reducing noise

Applying noise reduction without capturing a noise print first. The effect needs a sample of the noise you want to remove. Selecting silence, capturing that print, then applying the reduction to the whole file is the correct order. Skipping straight to the effect with a flat profile either does nothing or muffles the wanted audio.

Editing in Multitrack when Waveform is the right tool. The multitrack view shows clips on a timeline; the waveform editor lets you make destructive cuts, fades and spectral repairs to a single file. Beginners often try to remove a click inside multitrack by slicing around it, when switching to the waveform editor and using the spot healing brush takes two seconds and leaves no seams.

Ignoring the Essential Sound panel entirely. Users coming from older Audition versions or other DAWs sometimes dive straight into the Effects Rack for tasks the Essential Sound panel handles with one click — loudness normalisation, dynamics, and basic cleanup. The panel groups controls by content type, which speeds up podcast and video-post work dramatically.

Forgetting to set the sample rate before recording. Starting a session at 44.1 kHz then importing video audio at 48 kHz leads to pitch and sync drift. Matching the session sample rate to your source material before you record or import saves rework later.

How Audition compares with similar Mac apps

Logic Pro. Logic is a full production DAW with virtual instruments, MIDI sequencing and a massive sound library. Audition skips MIDI and software instruments entirely and focuses on waveform editing, audio restoration and multitrack mixing for video and broadcast. If you're scoring a film with sampled strings, Logic is the tool. If you're cleaning dialogue, matching loudness and delivering a final mix for a video editor, Audition gets you there with fewer clicks.

Ocenaudio. Ocenaudio is a lightweight waveform editor with a clean interface and real-time effect preview. It handles basic cut-and-fade jobs well and is easier to learn in an afternoon. But it lacks multitrack sessions, spectral editing at Audition's depth, and the Essential Sound panel's content-aware processing. For quick single-file edits Ocenaudio is fine; for a multi-mic podcast with music beds and loudness standards, Audition scales better.

DaVinci Resolve (Fairlight). Fairlight is built into Resolve and gives video editors a capable multitrack audio environment without leaving the editing suite. Its loudness normalisation and bus routing are solid. Audition pulls ahead on spectral cleanup and the sheer number of built-in effects — over fifty, compared to Fairlight's more modest set. If you work inside Resolve for picture, Fairlight may be enough. If audio is the deliverable, or you need the noise-reduction and remix tools, Audition remains the stronger standalone choice.

• Under-the-hood improvements to playback and rendering stability.

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
• Intel or Apple Silicon Mac