Adobe Audition is my choice for editing podcasts and other audio. At NAB Show 2016, Adobe demonstrated the new “Essential Sound” panel.

This new panel in the multitrack editor focuses on dialog and music effects common for post-production. Select your clips and easily adjust loudness, compression, equalization, noise removal, and more.

Instead of complicated dialogs, Adobe Audition's Essential Sound panel offers simple controls that are intelligently adjusted based on Audition's analysis of the audio.

These effects aren't limited by simple sliders! What you do in the Essential Sound panel is applied with Audition's powerful clip effects. For example, Essential Sound provides a single slider for compression that then applies Audition's dynamic compressor with ideal settings. You or an editor can then tweak the compressor settings in the standard effects panel.

Editors can also save presets for the Essential Sound panel to make it even faster to apply the desired effects.

The Essential Sound panel is currently limited to clip-level effects in a multitrack project, but I expect they'll expand that in the future.

Expect this Adobe Audition CC update in summer, 2016.