I'm a little bit in the music production scene, and literally never see or hear anyone uses Audition. Not on posts on reddit, not on tutorials on YT.
On it's wikipedia page it says that it's a DAW (and not exclusively an editing station), so the best and most popular DAWs today are those that have been so for the last two decades: Cubase, Pro-tools, Logic, Ableton. The first three have top notch audio editing capabilities, and none of them require a subscription.
Thanks. I'm mostly interested in the audio analysis workflows. Spectrum/frequency analysis, stereo/spatial analysis, chirp generation, perhaps basic additive synthesis capabilities (ability to generate waves with shape and frequency). Less interested on the DAW side (MIDI, Sequencing, VSTs, etc). The DAWs you've mentioned there are generally great, but are often less geared towards the workflows I'm after...
Audition isn't really a music-production DAW - in fact, it doesn't even support MIDI or VST generator plugins. It's mostly an audio recorder and editing software for movie dialogue, game audio, podcasts etc.
Audition used to be Cool Edit Pro. I really loved the UI of that program back in the day. I don't know what it's like these days, but back then (either the late 90s or the early 2000s, I can't quite remember) it was great as a wave file editor and a multi-track mixer.
Ninja'd - was about to write the same but hit refresh beforehand. Syntrillium's Cool Edit Pro did have a multi-track recording and arrangement view, it was no longer a purely sample-based editor (Cool Edit 2000 and earlier did not have this feature, IIRC).
I also don't know how it has changed when it got taken over.
Audacity is audio Notepad. That it runs everywhere is a plus; on the other hand, it's super clunky, it doesn't act like any other DAW, and its editing behaviors are well behind the curve.
I use Logic Pro for most things and have a dedicated, old Mac to run it, but Reaper is quite good and like $60 if one's on Windows or Linux (and isn't nearly as inscrutable as Ardour). Ableton Live is another stand-by and it runs on a Mac.
But in 2022 it's hard to recommend Audacity for much of anything, even aside from their drama problems.
