You can use Adobe Audition as a disk recorder very, very simply.
Here I am, in the Waveform view, and I've got nothing open at all.
But you'll notice that this red button is standing out.
It's pretty much the only thing I can do right now is record a new audio file.
I'm going to click on this red button and Audition's going to invite me to create a new audio file.
I've already got one that I'm going to open up in a second, but you can see here I have all my standard options to define the Name and the Sample Rate and so on.
I'll just Cancel out of this.
I'm going to double click in the Files panel, and I'm going to open up a file that I created, just to save me from going through those settings.
So here it is.
And you can see, I've got my Waveform view at the top.
I've got my Spectral Display at the bottom.
Everything is blank.
And now, I have a few more controls.
I can play and so on.
But I still have this red button waiting for me to click it.
Before I hit record, I might want to check the level that my system is receiving.
And down here in the Levels panel, if I want to, I can right click or Control click.
And at the top here I've got Meter Input Signal.
You'll notice there are a range of other options here, I suppose most of which you can play with and work out.
But notice especially that we have this dB Range.
By default, we're looking at a 60 dB Range.
That means from 0 at the top, fully attenuated, that means as loud as it can go down to -60 dB.
If I set this to 120 dB Range, you can see it just changes the scale.
We're still going ultimately down to infinitely quiet at the bottom.
The reason audio is recorded with 0 dB at the top, as the loudest, I suppose is because what we're measuring is the maximum amplitude our recording device can take, down to, what is really the noise floor.
Infinitely quiet isn't really infinitely quiet.
There's always a little bit of system noise.
There's always a little bit of background sound, even if it's just electromagnetism interfering with the cables.
So we're starting with as loud as we can go and going down to the quietest we can record before we get that background hiss.
I'm going to set this back to 60 dB Range, and I'm going to right click again or Control click, and I'm going to choose Meter Input Signal.
Notice this is ALT+I or Option+I to toggle this on.
Now I've got my machine set up to take my microphone input and lo and behold, you can see I'm speaking and the meter is displaying the noise.
This feature is very useful if you just want to check you are not peaking a little bit too loud.
With digital recording, if you go over 0 dB, you can be in trouble.
With old analog recording systems if you override the audio, it just kind of goes a bit fuzzy.
But with digital recording systems you really do not want to go beyond 0 dB.
You really want to be peaking pretty much where I am here, between maybe -12 dB, -6 dB, maybe just touching on - 3 dB.
Pushing over towards 0 dB, pushing over to the red is not a good idea.
And being digital you can go lower.
The signal-to-noise ratio, that means the difference between the loudest part, the signal, the bit that you want of the recording and the bit you don't want, the background noise, that ratio is very good with digital systems.
So if I want to start recording, I just hit the red button, and hello, this is me recording directly into Adobe Audition.
And as you can see, Audition is drawing this beautiful waveform of my speech at the top.
And I've got the Spectral Display showing the frequency range as well.
And I can just keep going.
If I want to, I can pause.
I kind of paused in the middle of the word pause there, didn't I, so it's going to have a bit of a break.
And I can un-pause.
And here we go again.
Now I'm recording some more.
Remember, when you're recording, it's very, very easy to remove content in Audition.
Of course it's much more difficult to add it, especially if you've got midword as I just paused myself there in midword.
I'm just going to have to record that sentence again if I wanted to keep this recording.
Of course, that's no problem.
That's what Audition is for.
But here we go.
I'm happy with that recording.
I'm going to click stop.
There it is.
It's highlighted in white because it's selected.
I'm just going to deselect by clicking anywhere in the selection.
There's my waveform.
Notice the little asterisk next to the file name.
I'm going to press Control+S or Command+S to save, and my audio file is done.
So, again, with Audition, either have an audio file open and hit Record or if you don't have any audio files open, Audition will invite you to create one.
Wherever the playhead is - that's this red line here - wherever that is when you hit record, it's going to start recording over the top of what is there.
So, it's easy enough for you to replace parts of the audio if you want to.
My advice though is to create additional files and blend them together later.
It's better to give yourself the options, and if you like, to fix it in post.
