Adobe Audition is one of the most popular audio editing and analysis programs on the market. Originally known as CoolEdit Pro, Audition was re-launched in the early 2000s by software giant Adobe. It offers dozens of high-quality effects, an intuitive multitrack editor, an audio file editor, a CD burner and other professional audio essentials.

In our testing, Adobe Audition was fairly stable and easy to use. We did experience a few crashes when the program encountered something unexpected, for instance when our audio interface came unplugged during playback. It's still stable enough for professional use.

Audition has a practically limitless set of audio options and hundreds of audio effects and presets. You also get MIDI support, which is somewhat limited out of the box but useful when paired with a few plugins. Adobe Audition works very well with other audio programs like FL Studio. Its high-quality presets make it easy to create high-quality songs and professional-sounding voice overs. However, this is a professional tool, and casual users will probably feel a bit lost at first. Fortunately, Audition has a large, helpful user community. You can easily find a tutorial if you get stuck.

Adobe made a major misstep with one of their recent releases of Adobe Audition by completely reinventing the core engine, greatly limiting the program's basic functionality in the process. Thankfully, the latest version reverses some of the changes and delivers a characteristically powerful and easy-to-use experience for professional audio editors.

There are few audio editing programs on the market as powerful as Adobe Audition. ProTools is probably more popular for music editing, but Audition certainly has its dedicated fans. It's a great tool with support for tons of plugins and most popular audio hardware, and in the right hands, it's a formidable environment for recording and editing audio at a professional level.