Speaker 1: WavePad versus Adobe Audition. Hello, it's Peter Baker from VoiceOver Masterclass, and with any software comparison, I'll assume you've yet to make the choice of speech recording and editing audio software here. If you've already had some time with either of these programs, you'll be leaning in that direction anyway. It's human nature. It's like always wearing your favorite cuddly sweater when you've got other choices in the wardrobe. And there's also, of course, Audacity, GarageBand, there's SoundForge, Logic Pro, and so on. But in my opinion, the two top contenders, especially for voiceover recording and voice editing work, Adobe Audition and NCH WavePad. In fact, we've made separate best-selling courses on how to use both of them in great detail at voiceovermasterclass.com. So, what features have they both got? Adobe Audition and WavePad audio editors are available for PC and Mac. WavePad is also on your phone, if you want it, as iOS and Android, and are both able to record and edit waveforms with many essential features, such as amplification, normalization, compression, equalization, filtering, noise reduction, reverberation, and so on. Now, when editing audio files, you can cut, you can copy, you can paste parts of recordings, just like text in a Word document, and then you can add effects and save in a variety of file formats. Although, unless you're recording phone prompts, you'll just be working with 24-bit WAV files for recording the industry standard, and editing and exporting for demos and auditions as the smaller MP3 files, and both can do those absolutely fine. So, what has NCH WavePad got that Adobe Audition hasn't got? Well, even though I personally am an audition man for most of my work, when I've got a long recording that needs to be split into smaller files in many e-learning or game acting voice jobs, when you've got like 200, 300 very small shouts or lines that you've got as an actor, well, I turn to WavePad after recording because that's got an amazing auto-split feature. When you're recording, you just leave silence between the elements, and then WavePad can automatically sense these gaps and in a split second, create separate files. Adobe Audition does not have this feature. Audition also doesn't have a way to adjust pitch of playback to compensate for speed changes. Why would you want this? Well, to save time listening to long narration scripts and audio books when you want to check for mistakes. Double speed audio playback, well, it saves time, but it does your head in after a while. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities

Speaker 2: between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health, and illiteracy.

Speaker 1: So bringing the pitch down helps the brain. Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We're confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health, and illiteracy. It's an important feature. Audition doesn't have it, but WavePad does. Even Adobe's video editor, Premiere Pro, has this feature where you can double speed and hear it at the same pitch, but no, Audition hasn't got it. In WavePad, the Speed button and the Effects tab gives you the option to adjust playback speed, pitch or speed, and or pitch. And by the way, if you're an Audacity fan, well, you probably found under Effects, Change Speed, and you can speed up keeping the pitch the same, but in Audacity, you have to process the audio first. This means that after you've done your listening at double speed, you have to unprocess it afterwards and you get nasty artifacts on your audio, so it's not worth it. You just want it to listen to. I also turn to WavePad when editing a long interview with someone when I know the answers need to be in a different order than when you recorded them. Say you're interviewing someone for a podcast and you're coming out of one subject. You want that question or answer to be first. Well, I first cut out all the rubbish and then I select and save the individual answers into regions. This is in WavePad, by the way, so you can easily move these regions around in the order you need for your podcast documentary in the Assemble Regions tool. Brilliant. Adobe Audition doesn't have this regions feature and you can't even color code sections you select in the Wave Editor, so it's hard to do this kind of work in Audition's Wave Editor unless you use its Multitrack tab. Aha. Multitrack, of course. Yes, Audition's Multitrack capability is excellent and even though the jobbing voice-over wouldn't use this facility much unless they were adding music to show reels or demos or doing podcasts. When you really, really need Multitrack, you need a good Multitrack. Podcast production, doing radio plays, of course, definitely needs Multitrack. WavePad doesn't have it. WavePad is, after all, a Wave Editor. The clue is in the name. It does have a sort of mix and overlay feature which is pretty hit or miss, to be honest. I would miss it, personally, and forget about it. But NCH also offer compatible sister software called MixPad. And MixPad, you can mix unlimited tracks, you can add audio effects, it comes with a copyright-free library of sound effects, hundreds of music tracks thrown in as well, if you want. Now, Adobe Audition doesn't have a complementary library of any kind included with Audition. You need to take out a separate subscription to Adobe Stock for this. Yes, the S word. That could be the decider for you. Subscription. In the old days, Adobe would sell you a disc with a sticker on it with a code. You'd bought the software and you'd have it forever. Then they realised that, particularly with audio editing, when there aren't really that many massive breakthroughs and upgrades that could be made, unlike, say, video editing software with HD and 4K and all these fancy visual effects, they could make more cash by making it a subscription-only model. The advantages to the user, you get the latest tweaks and so on every few months, but they aren't just that, often just minor bug fixes that you should have got right in the first place. Plus, you can only use the software on two machines at once with Adobe. This is annoying for me, personally. I've got Adobe on my voice booth computer and also on my main studio computer. So, if I need it on my laptop as well, in order to edit audio on the train to London, I have to log out of one of the active computers and go through all the faff of going through security, log in on the new machine, send you a text, and all that nonsense. Whereas WavePad is so cheap in comparison to Audition to buy out, you could simply buy multiple copies. And in fact, that's often what I do on the train when I'm hacking stuff out. I might as well make use of the time by using WavePad on my laptop. There's no point giving you actual prices in this video. I don't know your local currency, and you may be watching this in 2073 when inflation has gone through the roof. But generally, for three months of subscribing to Adobe at the time of recording, you can buy outright the standard edition of WavePad. For five months of an Adobe subscription, you can buy outright the master's edition of WavePad. I say, it's posh, isn't it? It comes with VST plug-in capability, as well as a big sound library. By the way, you can subscribe to WavePad as well if you wish. It's still much cheaper than Audition, and you get upgrades as well. If you buy outright, you don't get any free upgrades. You try to download the new one, you've got to buy it again. So, who wins the battle of WavePad versus Audition? Well, for me personally, I'm going to say Audition, even though it's way more expensive. I'm recording audio all day long, and for me, it's more robust. I find it easier to navigate. But there again, I've been using Audition years before using WavePad. It's my favourite old sweater. It's also better, in my view, to fix poorly recorded audio. You can use the clearer, in my view, spectral view to zoom in and see the imperfections, although WavePad does have a good spectral view. Audition also has the excellent denoise feature to clean up background noise. It's also far better at accepting VST plug-ins, like, say, Waves VX Clarity that I use a lot, and Deverberate software I use that a lot for cleaning up video interviews, the sound on there. WavePad is a bit iffy, to be honest, when it comes to VST compatibility. If you don't edit all day, I'd go for WavePad and plump for the Master's Edition. It's worth it for the extra whistles and bells, such as, say, file batch processing, the handy Autofile Trimmer. Basically, it hacks the start and end rubbish off the ends of waveforms just with a click, and it's, of course, far cheaper than Adobe Audition. At the time of recording, both offer a free trial, and for Adobe, you get the free trial on what's called the Creative Cloud, where they'll attempt you to subscribe to not just Audition, but all the rest of the family of the programs of theirs, too. Hey, if you'd like to take the free first modules of the detailed Adobe Audition and NCH WavePad courses, please check out voiceovermasterclass.com, and thank you very much for watching.