Adobe Audition is an amazing piece of software. It provides an impressive toolset for recording, editing and mixing audio.
Besides my work at multimediacollege as a certified instructor on Coldfusion and Dreamweaver, I’m also sound engineer and, as such, I spend most of my free-time on adobe audition recording and mixig demos, soundtracks, live performances,… Actually, Audition is the Adobe software that I use the most, much more thant dreamweaver and Coldfusion actually, and i’m too contaminated by the virus of music for this situation to change…
When I read user forums about Adobe Audition, one of the question that comes back on a regular basis is to know which sound card is supported by adobe Audition, so I thougth it was time to add my own comments about it to explain that Adobe Audition is not compatible with any particular sound card, but instead complies to a set of standards in use in the professionnal audio World.
Your worst enemy is latency!
Latency is the delay between an application sending sound to the sound being reproduced by the soundcard. This delay does not exceeds a couple of milliseconds, but still, when recording a multitrack session, this delay is way too long for the musician that has to play its line in sync with a previously recorded track. It’s kind of easy to understand since the audio flow between the microphone that capture the sound and the headphone that renders it to the recording musician is quite long.
- The sound is send from the microphone to the sound card (also called an audio interface). There, the audio signal is converted from analog to digital. This operation can be quite complex and take a bit of time.
- The digital audio stream is send to the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software (like Adobe Audition for example) through an USB or fireWire connection.
- The DAW sends the sound to an hard disk where it is recorded
- The DAW reads the sound it has just recorded and sends it back to the audio interface
- The audio interface converts the digital audio signal back to analog audio signal and sends it to the headphone pre-amplifier
- The preamp amplifies the sound and sends it to the musician
So many things happen between the mike and the headphone that the musician will hear himself with a delay that prevents him from playing in sync with the other tracks of the session that has been recorded previously. And to make things worst, the native sound support on the windows platform has a very poor latency performance (well, it’s enough for a great consumer experience, but way behind the requirements of an audio professional!)
ASIO is your best friend!
ASIO stands for Audio Stream Input/Output. It is a soundCard Driver protocol developed by Steinberg (the inventor of Cubase and Nuendo among others). ASIO drivers, provides a low-latency and high fidelity interface between a software application and a computer’s sound card. To achieve such low latency, ASIO simply bypasses the normal audio path from the user application through layers of intermediary Windows operating system software, so that the application connects directly to the soundcard hardware. Another great thing about the ASIO driver is that an unmixed ASIO output is “bit-identical” to the original WAV file played by the DAW.
The low latency and high fidelity fetures of ASIO make it THE standard in use for professionnal audio production
What about Adobe audition?
Audition is a profesional piece of audio software and as such if fully ASIO compliant. So any soundCard that uses the ASIO drivers is compatible with Audition.
Personnaly I use a MOTU 828MKII external audio Interface that is extended by a MOTU 8 pre Micophone pre-amplifier. This system gives me a total of 20 direct to disk high fidelity inputs and 22 outputs!! I link that system to Audition through a simple USB connection.
I wish you a lot of fun with Adobe Audition! Let’s our low latency devices Rock the entire planet!
Musically yours…
Damien
More on ASIO
The ASIO page on Wikipedia
Technical facts of 8 ASIO comliant profesionnal audio interface on the SonoMag WebSite (In French)
More on Adobe Audition
The Adobe Audition page on adobe.com
[...] by Happypixel on February 6th, 2009 at 06:59pm Which sound Card for adobe Audition? | multimediacollege%26trade; blog adobe Audition is an amazing piece of software. It provides an impressive toolset for recording, [...]
Thanks Damien for a uniquely helpful article, I hadn’t found this information elsewhere on the web.
Could you please guide me as to which audio/voice card is best for text-to-speech applications?
Best regards
Vilu
Hello,
I have no knowledge of a sound card that would be specifically designed for text-to-speech application. I would say that in your case, the sound card is not the most important piece of the puzzle as it will only translate in sounds whatever audio data stream is produced by the text-to-application. In other word, the text-to-speech app is to me much more important taht the sound card.
Nevertheless, if you want an inexpensive yet professionnal ASIO compliant sound interface, I would recomment you visit the M-audio or Edirol Website. Those brands provide great entry-level products for needs like yours.
am a sound technician. am using Adobe audition for recording but its not compatible with ASIO. am using a 24 bit sound card and i wish to know if there is an ASIO driver that is compatible with any Adobe Audition
thank
Hi,
Asio Support was a new feature of Audition 2. So, if you are still using Audition 1 or 1.5, your software is indeed not compatible with ASIO.
If you are using Audition 2 or 3, then your software supports Asio Driver.
There is NO ASIO driver specifically compatible with Audition as ANY ASIO driver that is compatible with your hardware is de facto compatible with audition (2 and 3).
To set it up into audition, you have to use the ‘audio Hardware settings’ menu Item.
Hi Damien-
I am new to Adobe Audition and have version 3. I am getting the error message.. “you are using a direct sound input.. for best results select an ASIO driver”.. every time I go to Audio Setup and select run ASIO driver in background.. it does nothing. I get the same error message and cannot arm to record anything. Does this mean I need an ASIO card ? Right now there is a Creative Sound Blaster PCI in the computer. Thanks, J
Hi Damien,
any great mixer/interface with moving faders you would recomand for the AA?
I’ved used Cooledit and Audition for years. I have old Layla 24bit cards that work just fine. I have run into trouble trying to use cheap consumer audio cards or the onboard audio hardware. You take a chance on getting good results with the WDM drivers supplied with your card or computer. You probably need to use ASiO. ASIO is software, not hardware. Search for and Download ASIO4ALL. It’s free and it works. It is just a driver that loads very easily and will allow you to select ASIO from the Audition harware menu. Whether or not it fixes your problem depends on the quality of your audio card.
By the way, Audition 2 and 3 both have “drop out” problems if you do not set the Audio hardware
and Audition hardware setting at the same sample rate. 44100 or 48000 and so on. The dropsoutss occur at regular intervals. They can be a minute apart or 10 minutes apart depending on the magnitude of the bjt rate missmatch. The dropouts are not very long in duration (20millsec or so) and they will ruin an otherwise perfect recording! I have not found any article about these dropouts that is correct. I spent HOURS determining what was actually causing them. Most articles recomend the ASIO driver for the dropout problem but that’s not the trouble. ASIO corrects latency. Matching of bit rates prevents dropouts. (Audition may claim to set the hardware to the correct bit rate but with many audjo card you must use the control panel or the audio cards own software to force the change. I set both bit rates to the recording standard of 48000bps. My bad experience was with the most popular consumer card and the on motherboard audio drivers too.
Pro hardware such as Layla, motu etc don’t have these problems. If you don’t get these set up right your recordings can be slightly faster or slower in time again depending on the magnitude of the missmatch. Make sure you bitrates match all of your hard and software or you’re in for unpredictable trouble!
Doug
Nice article. My problem is that my sound card (Realtek HD audio) is not at all compatible. I have to use my computer from 2002 w/ Audition 1.0. That old, obsolete computer is actually better than my 2008 computer w/ Vista, because it can actually record while my new computer cannot! Ouch!
On my new computer, when I open Audition, I get an error message saying that my sound card does not support DirectSound input. What? Well, it doesn’t output from Audition either, but it does output from Windows media player. I called DELL and Adobe customer support, both of whom recommended another sound card. The Audition guy recommended an ASIO-compatible sound card, even after downloading and installing an “ASIO for all” driver. (After changing hardware settings and confirming that the driver is correctly recognizing the sound card, Audition still gives me the error message.) Well, the sound cards out there are infinite. Can you give me advice?
All I need is a basic sound card w/ pro-features, but just basic. Does that exist? I would like support for 24 bit 96 kHz recording, w/ only a few digital AND analog inputs, including an 1/8″ stereo input (like the kind for headphones). What I use it for is xferring audio from cassette or mini-disk to the computer hard drive, after which I xfer that to a CD at CD-quality audio (16 bit) as a back-up. So, I archive audio to CD, but want to also have the capability to record in 24 bit if needed in the future.
In the future, I will be recording interviews and editing them, and possibly posting them on the internet as .wav or streaming audio.
Can you point me in the right direction? maybe a search term I could put in Google, or, better yet, 2 or 3 basic sound cards that would serve my needs?
Great info!!! very helpful!! just one question, will an Alesis IO2 work? and do you know if it has a lot of latency? thanks!!