In this tutorial Shaun Whynacht walks viewers through several practical ways to adjust audio levels in Adobe Audition. He begins by comparing two recordings—one captured at a neutral input gain (12 o'clock) and another with the gain turned down—demonstrating the audible difference. He then shows three main techniques: (1) dragging the yellow volume envelope line on a clip to raise or lower its decibel level; (2) using the Auto Vocal Leveler (Amplitude → Compression → Speech Volume Leveler) from the Effects Rack, especially useful for mixed‑track podcasts where guest and host audio are on the same track; (3) applying the Amplify effect (Amplitude → Compression → Amplify) to an entire file after selecting all clips. Throughout, Shaun points out visual cues such as waveform size, peak meters, and decibel readouts, and he warns against simply boosting low‑level recordings because it also amplifies background noise. He advises setting proper input gain during recording—adjusting mixer gain or microphone placement—to avoid noisy amplification. The video ends with a call to subscribe for more marketing and audio‑editing content.
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Hi everybody, in this tutorial I'm going to be showing you how you can adjust audio levels using Adobe Audition. Now, like Adobe Audition in other ways, adjusting audio levels, there's not only one way to do it. So I'm going to show you a bunch of different ways. Now, here on the screen, first of all, I'm just going to zoom in so we can see all of this in an easier format. So we can zoom in horizontally and vertically. Okay, so I've got two audio files here on the screen. One of which I recorded at a neutral level, meaning the gain on the input was at 12 o'clock, and then I suppressed the gain all the way down to almost zero and recorded from the exact same position, but obviously the level was a lot lower. So we just take a listen to these, you'll hear the difference. This audio recording is set at 12 o'clock and the audio level is excellent. Now we have suppressed So as you can see, the second one is much lower. Now, how do we go ahead and we adjust audio levels? Well, there's a bunch of different ways like I mentioned when we started. One of the first ways that you can do it is this yellow line right here that says volume. Now, if we drag this up by clicking and holding, you can see just below it says the decibel level. Okay, so I drag that all the way to the top. While it may sound okay, —excellent. Now we have suppressed the gain, right? Almost the same level. Visually, you can't really see the difference. Okay, so let's just bring that back. I'm going to actually edit, undo, and bring it back to neutral. Now, another way to adjust audio, and this is the way that I use if there is a mixed audio track, meaning I do a lot of podcast editing for clients, and there are times where they're recording in Zoom and and they have themselves and their guests on one single audio track where the levels are different. In that case, what I do is I use the Auto Vocal Leveler. So, you'd select the track that you're on, and on the left-hand side or wherever you see the effects rack. Now, if you can't see the effects rack, you're going to go up to your Windows and make sure effects rack is turned on. You can apply these different effects depending on which track you're on. You just have to make sure that track is selected. We're going to go ahead and we're going to click the little arrow here. We're going to go to Amplitude and Compression and Speech Volume Leveler. Now, one of the benefits of this is you can go ahead and hit play in behind and it will start to play. Now, I'm not sure in the screen recording if you're actually seeing this pop up here. Sometimes you don't, but I'm not going to tell you the exact settings, so you have to play with it. But in most cases, you're going to have isolated audio tracks, meaning that each track is going to be a different source. This way that I'm going to show you here, I'm just going to zoom this back a little bit, is a great way to adjust the audio levels, especially if you've got multiple tracks, multiple cuts, and you're a visual reference person. We notice by looking at the audio track here, we can see this is a fairly decent audio track from the size. This one, not so much. Now, down on the left-hand side, you've got this little, it almost looks like a cell phone signal. Well, if we go ahead and we click and hold, you see the little arrows there, click and hold, and we drag to the right, we're going to see the audio levels are going to start to grow. Now we can match them to the other one. It went up 24.7 decibels. Now when we play it, and the audio level is excellent. Now we have suppressed the— and what I'm looking at down here in the bottom is where it's peaking. Okay, so it's peaking about here, which is around about a -10. Which is okay for me for podcasts. So that is one great way to adjust those levels. So those are the 3 areas to do that. There is another way that you could do it if you wanted to adjust an entire file, is by double-clicking on the file, selecting all, Ctrl+All or whatever if you're on a Mac, it's a different command, and then we're going to go to the effects Amplitude and Compression, Amplify, and then we can go ahead here and slide this, right? It was, I think it was like 26.7 or close enough. Hit Apply. It's going to amplify that. Now, one of the downsides to having low levels is the fact, and we can see it here visually represented, is this line which should be silent should be a completely flat line, now is rigid. That means there is noise in that file. So if you are recording yourself and you are getting low levels and you say, "No, don't, it's okay. I'm just gonna boost it in the editing," you are boosting the background noise that's there. It's always great to just justify, not justify, great word, eh? But adjust the amplification or the input signal into the recording at the time of recording. So whether you're using a gain on your, on your mixer, or you have to reposition your microphone a little closer, that's a couple of things that you can do to improve your audio. So if you liked this video, go ahead, subscribe to our channel. We'll be doing more of these as well as other marketing videos for business. But I hope you enjoyed this, and thanks for watching.
